Oh so leaving the EU didn’t mean all the staff leaving, turns out that was another lie. Now can we please get on with fixing it?
Medical school is hard and expensive. It’s not as though the pay is good either, judging by all the the strikes you’d be a fool to join
Bloody immigrants, coming here and propping up our health service.
How very dare they!
Someone needs to work in poor positions for mediocre pay.
The English often don’t want to, that’s why we have to look for skilled workers from abroad.
Why would anyone in the UK go into the medical field in the first place, and if they do, why would they work here?
We pay them peanuts and the return on their investment is not worth it.
I did an apprenticeship for 1.5 years and make way more than a junior doctor after 10 years of training and 100K plus in student loans.
The kind of intelligent people you want in that position would never take such an awful deal.
Maybe they should try paying NHS staff properly and UK nationals would want to do the job instead of having to import talent
Actually, as an immigrant (but uk grad) they are actually taking opportunities away from local medical graduates. Because since 2019, unlike literally everywhere else in the world, international graduates from almost ANY university in the world are given the same priority for picking jobs as local graduates, so we are competing against each other. And there is a massive shortage of jobs.
Any other country, local graduates have first pic, then locals who graduate abroad and then finally immigrants, of what’s left.
Countries like India would never accept uk medical graduates unless you graduated from a “select few “uk universities, did a couple of their licensing exams and then you get a pick of the undesirable jobs that no one wants to do
Most immigrant doctors plan to use training from the uk as a stepping stone to greener pastures like the Middle East or Australia.
The UK is refusing to prioritise their own because most immigrants won’t strike and will work for lower pay. Easier to control.
This is what happens when you lack a credible workforce plan.
We have known for decades that once the boomer generation hit retirement age and beyond it was going to put an incredible strain on structures such as the health service. Analysts had watched this bulge in the demographics graph of the UK and warned governments at the time that planning was needed to ensure the health service could expand to accommodate them.
Unfortunately with the way governments work where short term political decisions are favoured over planning in the long term this never happened. As why implement something now that a government 20 years in the future may take credit for.
We are now at that point though where boomers health is failing and failing quickly! There is no time to train up more doctors as their training is so long, training for nurses and other healthcare professionals is shorter but still takes several years. Even if they did want to train UK healthcare professionals there is not the capacity within current courses to expand as much as would be needed.
To get around this we are seeing a huge increase in recruitment of foreign healthcare workers. With doctors it is quite stark around 9000 doctors trained in the UK joined the GMC register in 2022, compared to around 15,500 doctors trained abroad. There has also been an expansion of physician associates PAs, they essentially do a 2 year course and then work a bit like a doctor just without the knowledge and experience. This obviously has its problems and has resulted in some high profile cases where PAs have misdiagnosed patients some of whom have died. In most cases if they had been seen by a doctor there is every chance they would have received the correct diagnosis and treatment.
This however is not a solely UK phenomenon and many other developed countries are facing this very same problems with an increasingly older, economically inactive population all starting to access healthcare more frequently. This does cause problems for the UK though as it means there is a global shortage of healthcare workers and countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand are more than happy to poach UK trained healthcare workers. We cannot compete with them though in terms of salary or work life balance. As a result the UK has to recruit from the developing world and for doctors India, Pakistan and Nigeria are the most common source of doctors. Ethically this is problematic as 2 of these countries are on the WHO red list,
Having worked in the NHS for the last 15 years I find it interesting that when I started the thought of the NHS collapsing never crossed peoples minds. 5-10 years ago there were occasional conversations that started with “if the NHS collapses….” Now I often hear other NHS workers talking about “when the NHS collapses….”
I was in for a lumber puncher and bar the main doctors of the procedure everyone a saw was indian or some other form of nationality.
Its sad to see that young nurses here dont want to work for nhs.
Driving down salaries for local nurses and staff.
I’m surprised the far left see this as a good thing for employees.
Fun fact, of 460 doctors struck off the medical record in the 2010-2015 period, 72% were trained abroad. Yes, expanding the talent pool to the entire world and picking the cheapest option inevitably results in “immigrants propping up the NHS”, but at what cost to the British public?
Why are we celebrating this? We still have a long way to go to reach 50/50 equality in the NHS. More doctors and nurses from poor third world countries desperately needed.
12 comments
Oh so leaving the EU didn’t mean all the staff leaving, turns out that was another lie. Now can we please get on with fixing it?
Medical school is hard and expensive. It’s not as though the pay is good either, judging by all the the strikes you’d be a fool to join
Bloody immigrants, coming here and propping up our health service.
How very dare they!
Someone needs to work in poor positions for mediocre pay.
The English often don’t want to, that’s why we have to look for skilled workers from abroad.
Why would anyone in the UK go into the medical field in the first place, and if they do, why would they work here?
We pay them peanuts and the return on their investment is not worth it.
I did an apprenticeship for 1.5 years and make way more than a junior doctor after 10 years of training and 100K plus in student loans.
The kind of intelligent people you want in that position would never take such an awful deal.
Maybe they should try paying NHS staff properly and UK nationals would want to do the job instead of having to import talent
Actually, as an immigrant (but uk grad) they are actually taking opportunities away from local medical graduates. Because since 2019, unlike literally everywhere else in the world, international graduates from almost ANY university in the world are given the same priority for picking jobs as local graduates, so we are competing against each other. And there is a massive shortage of jobs.
Any other country, local graduates have first pic, then locals who graduate abroad and then finally immigrants, of what’s left.
Countries like India would never accept uk medical graduates unless you graduated from a “select few “uk universities, did a couple of their licensing exams and then you get a pick of the undesirable jobs that no one wants to do
Most immigrant doctors plan to use training from the uk as a stepping stone to greener pastures like the Middle East or Australia.
The UK is refusing to prioritise their own because most immigrants won’t strike and will work for lower pay. Easier to control.
This is what happens when you lack a credible workforce plan.
We have known for decades that once the boomer generation hit retirement age and beyond it was going to put an incredible strain on structures such as the health service. Analysts had watched this bulge in the demographics graph of the UK and warned governments at the time that planning was needed to ensure the health service could expand to accommodate them.
Unfortunately with the way governments work where short term political decisions are favoured over planning in the long term this never happened. As why implement something now that a government 20 years in the future may take credit for.
We are now at that point though where boomers health is failing and failing quickly! There is no time to train up more doctors as their training is so long, training for nurses and other healthcare professionals is shorter but still takes several years. Even if they did want to train UK healthcare professionals there is not the capacity within current courses to expand as much as would be needed.
To get around this we are seeing a huge increase in recruitment of foreign healthcare workers. With doctors it is quite stark around 9000 doctors trained in the UK joined the GMC register in 2022, compared to around 15,500 doctors trained abroad. There has also been an expansion of physician associates PAs, they essentially do a 2 year course and then work a bit like a doctor just without the knowledge and experience. This obviously has its problems and has resulted in some high profile cases where PAs have misdiagnosed patients some of whom have died. In most cases if they had been seen by a doctor there is every chance they would have received the correct diagnosis and treatment.
This however is not a solely UK phenomenon and many other developed countries are facing this very same problems with an increasingly older, economically inactive population all starting to access healthcare more frequently. This does cause problems for the UK though as it means there is a global shortage of healthcare workers and countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand are more than happy to poach UK trained healthcare workers. We cannot compete with them though in terms of salary or work life balance. As a result the UK has to recruit from the developing world and for doctors India, Pakistan and Nigeria are the most common source of doctors. Ethically this is problematic as 2 of these countries are on the WHO red list,
Having worked in the NHS for the last 15 years I find it interesting that when I started the thought of the NHS collapsing never crossed peoples minds. 5-10 years ago there were occasional conversations that started with “if the NHS collapses….” Now I often hear other NHS workers talking about “when the NHS collapses….”
I was in for a lumber puncher and bar the main doctors of the procedure everyone a saw was indian or some other form of nationality.
Its sad to see that young nurses here dont want to work for nhs.
Driving down salaries for local nurses and staff.
I’m surprised the far left see this as a good thing for employees.
Fun fact, of 460 doctors struck off the medical record in the 2010-2015 period, 72% were trained abroad. Yes, expanding the talent pool to the entire world and picking the cheapest option inevitably results in “immigrants propping up the NHS”, but at what cost to the British public?
Why are we celebrating this? We still have a long way to go to reach 50/50 equality in the NHS. More doctors and nurses from poor third world countries desperately needed.