HOSPITAL bosses from the region will have the first pick of German consultants who want to work in the UK, The Northern Echo can reveal.

With 110 empty consultant posts, one of the highest rates in the country, the Northern and Yorkshire health region has been chosen to lead the NHS charge to recruit German specialists.

Dr Steve Atherton, the Merseyside medical director who is organising the international recruitment drive for the NHS, said: "Northern and Yorkshire is the area where it is most difficult to recruit and retain consultants."

As part of a deal agreed between the British and German governments, a team from up to 20 NHS trusts in the Northern and Yorkshire area will fly to a Berlin careers fair on April 24.

In a separate move, a team from County Durham and Darlington Health Authority is due to travel to Spain to clinch a deal to bring ten or 11 Spanish GPs back to the North-East. The Spanish doctors could be seeing patients as early as July.

County Durham and Darlington has some of the highest GP vacancies in the country, only exceeded by Sunderland and Teesside.

The Northern and Yorkshire region has 3.7 per cent of consultant posts vacant. This compares with an England average of three per cent.

Only the North-West (4.1 per cent) and the West Midlands (3.9 per cent) have higher levels of consultant vacancies.

John Madden, a human resources manager at the expanding South Tees Hospitals Trust in Middlesbrough, said they were planning to go to Germany in a bid to fill some of their 19 consultant vacancies, including three radiology posts.

"We have been asked whether we would be interested in going to a jobs fair in Berlin," he said. "We are planning to go out there with a consultant who speaks excellent German."

Many North-East and North Yorkshire hospitals already have German, Spanish and Dutch junior doctors, but so far no consultants.

A meeting will take place next week to finalise regionwide arrangements for the trip to Germany.

German hospital specialists who want to work in the NHS will have to satisfy Department of Health officials that they are fully competent and speak good English.

Meanwhile, health bosses estimate there are at least ten GP vacancies in County Durham and Darlington.

With increasing demands on the NHS and GPs retiring early, the whole region is facing a major problem.

There are only 50 GPs per 100,000 people in County Durham and Darlington, compared with 61 per 100,000 in Buckinghamshire.

Dr Andrew Oakenfull, chairman of the County Durham Local Medical Committee - who has two Dutch and one German colleagues in his ten-doctor Ferryhill practice - said the extra GPs from Spain should help with the chronic shortage but more were needed.

"They will hopefully ease the crisis, but there is also a concern about where we will put them," he said.

A spokesman for the Department of Health stressed that recruiting abroad was a short-term measure. "What is needed for the long term is investment in training budget and that is exactly what we have done," he said.