NHS recruits thousands of doctors from Third World… while limits on places deny British students chance to study medicine
The government has to pay the £250k it takes to train a doctor. Therefore the government limits the amounts of £250k it’s willing to pay to train doctors.
My GP is Nigerian, I’m perfectly happy with the medical care I get.
Only an economist would say that the £250K is THE limiting factor.
To become a doctor you need to prove intelligence, qualification and motivation. Maybe there just aren’t enough people in England with all three attributes.
Of course, it is true that it would take much more than £250K to turn a thicko into a doctor. But the important point is that we prefer waiting lists to bad doctors.
No idea where the £250000 figure comes from. I doubt it is true. The reason third world Dcotors come here is that they fill the shit jobs that no Doctor trained in this country would do. The Docs from here who cannot ge a job, go to Oz or NZ.
“No idea where the £250000 figure comes from.”
No doubt the cost of the doctor training program divided by the number of doctors it produces. Or put another way, £50k in doctor training & £200k for the long string of administrators essential to doctor training.
Or to put it another way, the British government steals doctors from other countries after their medical training is paid for by that country, a policy initiated by NuLabour. That’s socialism for you, living off the backs of others while overseas nations lose their investment.
The newspaper article states specifically that the applicants are straight ‘A’ students, there is no lack of qualification or application.
The govt also pays for the training of female doctors one third of which do approx 3 years work after graduation and then have a baby. One third of them go back to work full-time, one third part-time and one third never return to work at all. Thus spending a large chunk of the training budget for doctors who have a 3 year career.
Aren’t our limits imposed by the BMA? It makes perfect sense: the doctors’ union protects their high wages by limiting new entrants into the system. Then the government has to hire foreigners to get around the BMA’s tricks.
There’s definitely no shortage of suitably-qualified students.
Ahhhh bloke in spain has it right. The ‘cost’ is reallythe cost of employing all those hangers on who teach, or get their juniours to teach.
Andy,
No, the hangers on do not teach, they just “administrate” the teaching. At medical school there were always 2 or 3 bureaucrats getting in the way of us actually learning things.
No, the limitation on the number of doctors was agreed with the BMA when the NHS was set up. The BMA being the most effective trade union in the land fully understand how limited supply artificially pushes up wages.
I doubt if all of these foreign doctors have had £250,000 spent on their training I certainly hope not because that would look like reverse international aid from poor to rich.
I also suspect that an awful lot of diagnosis could be done better by computer. If we can now do computerised car driving is computerised diagnosis difficult? This could be a medical revolution any time it is allowed.
Up to a point. The official cost of training a doctor, up to when they can register, was £269,527 in 2011 (table 7.4). This comprises £57,433 in tuition fees, £60,301 in living expenses, and £151,792 in clinical placement costs. The tuition fees and living expenses are largely borne by the trainees, and the clinical placement cost (when the trainee goes and watches qualified doctors at work) is a somewhat arbitrary number relating to a notional division of grants to teaching hospitals (this system of payment is being reformed).
The Laughing cavalier – NuLabour? Wow, didn’t realise they were around in the 1960s. Three of the doctors at the surgery I was at as a child came to the UK from abroad to work, having trained overseas. We gained from them learning elsewhere, three very good doctors.
Perhaps these doctors trained overseas take one look at our terms & conditions compared to where they were and decided working in the UK was preferable.
I also suspect that an awful lot of diagnosis could be done better by computer. If we can now do computerised car driving is computerised diagnosis difficult?
It’s called Google. Last few times we had to go to a doctor for some reason, we already knew what the problem was, and just needed them to sign a piece of paper allowing us to buy the relevant treatment. Waste of their time, waste of our time, and a big waste of money if the government paid 250,000 for their training just so they could say ‘yes, you’re right’ and sign a piece of paper.
Doctoring is not a good occupation to go into today, because most of it will be automated away before a current medical student reaches retirement age. At least in countries which don’t have a bloated medical bureaucracy which will fight that tooth and nail.
Nonsense. That’s like saying plumbers are redundant because you can look up how to change a washer.
Much harder to automate a plumber’s job than the average doctor’s.
Besides which, last time we called our plumber about a leak, he just gave me instructions on how to fix it, because it wasn’t worth his time to come and do it for us.