Australians who want to relocate to the United Kingdom are in for a big financial boost – but there’s a catch.

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) announced on Thursday (local time) that Australian doctors will be granted £18,500 ($A34,000) to work permanently in the UK as they bid to fill a gaping hole in the medical sector.

The NHS hopes to secure 2000 foreign doctors by 2020/21 amid an undersupply of family doctors across the country.

“It’s no secret the NHS needs to recruit more GPs, so it makes sense to head to Australia where doctors’ skills, training and high levels of care closely match those of their British counterparts,” Dominic Hardy, NHS England’s director of primary care delivery, told the London Evening Standard.

However, according to The Telegraph, NHS officials believe they won’t be able to hit that target, instead expecting to recruit only about 1000 foreign medicos in the next few years.

Waiting lists to visit GPs have hit an “all time high”, chairman of the Royal College of GPs Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard told The Telegraph last month.

“Unfortunately, while workload in general practice is soaring, both in terms of volume and complexity, we are haemorrhaging family doctors from the NHS,” she said.

The wait times are reportedly expected to worsen in many parts of the United Kingdom within the next few months and there are concerns this may heighten the risk of illness among the British population.

Under current legislation, the number of skilled employees located outside the European Economic Area who are able to work in the UK under a sponsored visa is capped at 20,700 a year.

The British government declared it will relax this law to allow for Australian GPs to be recruited more easily and rapidly.

This could lead to the application procedure for Australian doctors reduced from a year to three months, with two recruitment agencies being tasked with finding suitable candidates.

Significant numbers of GPs have previously found it difficult to have their applications approved and subsequently called on the NHS to ease this process.

In the last four years, the London Ambulance Service successfully recruited more than 500 paramedics from Australia and New Zealand.