A shortage of nurses in Northern Ireland hospitals has forced health officials to try to recruit staff from abroad.

One in every 16 nurses in the province is from outside the British Isles, according to the latest figures.

The main suppliers are Australia, the Phillipines, and India and the hospitals have launched campaigns to try to attract more foreign workers.

Hilary Herron, the acting board secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said workforce planners got their sums wrong.

"Clearly, we were training too many (nurses), but I'm afraid we didn't get it quite right," she said.

Nurses are being recruited from outside the British Isles

"We reduced the intake when we went into the university situation to 425 in Queen's plus 40 of the BSC students at the University of Ulster.

"Prior to that, just the year before, we had been training over 700 nurses.

"As a consequence, that is why we are in the situation we are."

The Mater Hospital in Belfast has just recruited its first group of overseas nurses, which arrived from India on Sunday.

Maureen Leslie, from India, said it was a lovely hospital.

"There's nothing like this really in India," she said.

"It is really something - the cleanliness and the warm welcome that we got was lovely."

The Mater's new �11m block provides a working environment ahead of many hospitals in the province.

Most of the new recruits at the hospital are single but a few are married with children.

Sara Matthew, also from India, lived under canvas with her husband and family for three-and-a-half years while she trained as a nurse and midwife.

Then she left them for a year to train some distance away in theatre techniques and management.

Now she has come to Belfast for two years, again leaving them behind.

Nursing has always been an internationally mobile profession.

Northern Ireland, for instance, has always supplied nurses not just to elsewhere in the British Isles but in large quantities to north America as well.