An outbreak of swine flu will call for a centrally managed recruitment approach toward the temporary supply of nurses, according to Jo Wallis, chief executive at healthcare recruiter Geneva.

On Andrew Marr’s BBC1 programme yesterday, Sir Liam Donaldson told Marr that the country was “going to see more cases and probably more serious cases as we go into flu season”.

Wallis told Recruiterthat her company had learned the lessons of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndromer (SARS) outbreak in 2003 that had afflicted her native New Zealand.

“We have an ongoing pipeline of nurses going through the recruitment process. We have done something similar in New Zealand, where we recruited a bank of candidates to cope with the SARS outbreak. There was too much pressure on the New Zealand health system so they used contingency staffing and organisations like us to manage the projects. We staffed the airports and the community centres. It worked because it was managed centrally.”