For what it's worth, I was an ER nurse for 14 years in the states. I briefly worked for the NHS when I came to England, and now work as a Learning Administrator (I'm a whiz with excel and mainly produce management information, i.e. MI reports). My own person experience was that I took a serious pay cut when I moved here. In addition, the educational backgrounds and preparation of the nurses here in the UK didn't equate to what I had undertaken. One example -- I had to have two full semesters of Clinical Pharmacology as part of my RN Degree. We learned all the various drug classes, indications, normal doses, age/clinical condition variances to those dosages, LD 50 (Lethal dose 50), how they acted at a cellular level, etc. A Colleague at the NHS confided in me that her Clinical Pharmacology training was one 7-hour lecture from a Pharmacist. More than once my colleagues told me that here I would be considered a Junior Doctor.
I switched jobs, becoming a Trainer for one of the largest Health Care companies in the UK, and moved from training to administering the learning. I'm still not making as much as I did in the US, but I work 8am-4:30pm Mon-Fri, no Bank Holidays, and 27 day of annual leave a year to go and explore this incredibly beautiful and historic nation. My quality of life is much higher.
I don't know if this helps, but it was the journey that I made and it worked for my wife and I.
Cheers,
Jeb
