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Luring Doctors from Poorer Countries is the UK's Quiet Scandal

Cockburn, Patrick
http://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/16/luring-doctors-from-poorer-countries-is-the-uks-quiet-scandal/

Publisher:  CounterPunch
Date Written:  16/09/2022
Year Published:  2022  
Resource Type:  Article

The United Kingdom brings in medical professionals from poor and middle-income countries to make up for their shortage while disintergrating these countries' health systems.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

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 twice that number is needed. The shortage is made up by battening on the disintegrating health systems of poor and middle-income countries, mostly in Africa and Asia.

The exodus from there of medical professionals is high and getting higher. From the start, the National Health Service (NHS) has recruited from overseas. But within the last decade the influx has vastly increased, with the share of doctors recruited by the NHS from outside the UK and EU rising from 18 to 34 per cent and nurses from seven to 34 per cent between 2015 and 2021, according to statistics compiled by the BBC’s Shared Data Unit. The proportion of British-trained doctors in the health service has fallen from 69 to 58 per cent and nurses from 74 to 61 per cent over the same period.

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.

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