The government is being warned to improve conditions for London's nurses before they abandon the city for a better life abroad.

American and Australian hospitals, which themselves face a massive nursing shortage, are trying to tempt the capital's nurses away with promises of higher salaries and lower cost of living.

In the next few weeks hospitals from Miami, California and Cleveland are all holding recruitment days in London.

The US has to recruit 1.2m nurses over the next eight years while Australia needs another 31,000 by 2005.

Acute shortages

Nurses willing to uproot to Pennsylvania, where a 3-bed house costs around �80,000, are being offered a �30,000 starting salary at a jobs fair this week.

Nurse Padriag O'Hara, who went along after working a night shift at the Royal London Hospital, told BBC London: "I personally feel quite undervalued, I feel the nursing status should be higher than what it really is."

Nursing shortages are particularly acute in London where some major hospitals lose more than one third of their nursing staff each year.

Linda Thomas, editor-in-chief of Nursing Standard, said: "What the government needs to hear is that if they don't get it right, they won't have any nurses to worry about, they just won't be here. They will have gone."