ITALY is the next target for a North-East medical advisor who is trying to recruit hospital consultants for the National Health Service, it has emerged.

Dr Peter Royle, medical director at North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Trust has already scoured Germany and Austria for senior doctors willing to work in the UK.

Figures released by Dr Royle to The Northern Echo show that 76 European consultants have been offered jobs in England.

Another 296 consultants, mostly German and Austrian, have applied and their applications are being processed.

Since the drive was piloted in the North-East a year ago, 82 GPs from Europe have been signed up. Now Dr Royle has revealed that the next stage is a big push in Italy.

"We will start recruiting in Italy later this year," said Dr Royle, who took up his position as advisor to the Department of Health a year ago.

Initially, the scheme concentrated on the North-East but this has now been extended to the whole country.

Large numbers of Indian doctors are also applying for details through the internet.

Despite early criticism of the drive to recruit 1,000 foreign specialists, Dr Royle said the scheme was paying dividends.

"It is a long-term process and, with the regular recruitment teams and job fairs we are running, it is really beginning to produce the goods," he said.

Since a much-publicised jobs fair in Berlin last April - attended by many North-East hospital trusts - the recruitment team has fine-tuned its approach.

Now most of the vetting of prospective German and Austrian doctors is done by small teams in different regional centres, followed by job fairs in York and London.

In the past few weeks, a German and a Finnish consultant have joined the North Tees and Hartlepool trust and two other overseas consultants have recently joined the South Tees trust.

But Dr Royle forecast that the North-East could struggle to attract more applicants.

"We will find it increasingly difficult because a lot are attracted to London," he said.