Luring doctors from poorer nations is UK’s quiet scandal - it is a foreign aid in reverse. ✍️ Patrick Cockburn for ipaperviews
‘The parasitic dependence of the UK heath service on recruiting staff who would naturally prefer to work and live in a rich country than a poor one is set to grow rather than diminish,’ writes Patrick Cockburn
At issue is the policy of deliberately luring badly needed and expensively trained doctors and nurses from poor African and Asian countries to Britain. This happens because we train far too few doctors and nurses, offering only 7,500 medical school places when. The shortage is made up by battening on the disintegrating health systems of poor and middle-income countries, mostly in Africa and Asia.
On occasion, the scale of the loss of skilled medical staff has caused a scandal in their own country. In July 2020, for instance, Nigeria’s immigration service stopped 58 Nigerian doctors from flying out of Lagos international airport on a single plane bound for Britain. The Nigerian press protested that there were already 4,000 Nigerian doctors working in Britain, despite the fact that Nigeria has less than 15 per cent of the doctors needed by its 182 million people.
“And I haven’t seen anyone European coming after Brexit, at least in our department,” says Dr Tsigka. “Doctors that have applied to our department mostly come from India, Egypt and some from Sri Lanka.”
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