Wanted: UK doctors

For years, Britain has been failing to train enough doctors and has been importing them instead. This has been a well-known and much lamented fact, raising several ethical issues. Is it right for us to rob developing countries of their much-needed medics? Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS, said at the Spectator’s health summit this week that Britain should stop ‘denuding low-income countries of health professionals they need’. Quite so.

Which makes it all the more shocking that last year, for the first time ever, the UK imported more doctors than it trained. And the problem Stevens highlights has, under his leadership, been getting steadily worse. Look at the number of new doctors registering with the General Medical Council: three years ago, 44 per cent were foreign-trained. Last year, it was 53 per cent. Last summer, the government announced the removal of the cap on skilled workers entering the UK (the Tier 2 visa cap) for health workers. As a former NHS surgeon, I can well imagine what will now happen: the number could be as high as 60 per cent within two years.

To make matters worse, there’s growing evidence that an increasing number of our own trainees are leaving the profession — or choosing not to progress to speciality training. The convergence of these two factors is a recipe for disaster and there’s that moral problem too, given that foreign doctors invariably come from low-income countries, and have been trained at public expense. We’re poaching medics from places where they’re badly needed.

Why are our home-trained doctors leaving? It could be the conditions. They are often thrown in at the deep end after two years of training, looking after up to 60 patients on a 12-hour night shift, often alone, with inadequate handover or senior support. It can be a lonely, brutal experience, and some young doctors never recover.