Thursday 7 February 2008

Hypocrisy

"Have you seen this?"

Dr Ahmed, my supervising consultant for the day, is waving a copy of today's Times. On the front page, the main headline reads, "NHS closes its doors to foreign doctors"

Now,I don't usually write about political things in my blog but, I'm just going to point out one thing.

The British medical profession encourages foreigners to sit British post-graduate exams. this is so in can pocket thousands of pounds worth of exam fees from each doctor. At the same time as we are taking their money, we are now telling them they can't work here.

Isn't this more than a little hypocritical?

- Michael

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No, other countries value the British Royal College memberships because they prove 'excellence.'Overseas doctors will always benefit from them to find lucrative posts in their own countries.

With the current situation re speciality training, the government had to find a practical solution or thousands of British juniors would have had their career terminated as you know. For the time being, this protection will not solve the problem on numbers but will, at least, ease the situation. Of course, as the DoH has announced, overseas doctors will still be needed to work in the NHS and still have opportunities to progress to consultant through route 14.

Hard decisions have to be taken sometimes to save the day, otherwise everybody will just pull everybody else to the bottom of a very deep and merciless black hole.

You suffered in 2007 yourself and got a last minute reprieve. Others won't be so lucky this year even with this protection in place.

It's a fiasco where someone had to do something regardless of how hard it is.

David L. Cox said...

To me the recent announcement is a piece of overdue commonsense!

There is a value to overseas doctors in the membership of the Royal Colleges and their involvement in exams for these is not really controversial.

What is controversial is that the proposals still do not protect UK graduates in 2008/9, when overseas applicants will still be able to displace our own. As a taxpayer, I find it particularly annoying that training monies, often listed in the press at £250K per UK doctor is wasted in this way!

Overseas doctors should be welcome to fill the gaps, if there are any, not take up UK doctor's training places, thereby depriving them of their prospects of a career!