Britain Relies on Double the Western Average of Foreign Doctors and Nurses
Should Britain train and employ British NHS staff, or should we import cheap labour from abroad, who often speak poor English and come from countries with less rigorous clinical standards? For years, our immigration-loving political establishment has favoured the latter, meaning Britain has twice as many foreign doctors and nurses as the Western average, according to a new report. The Telegraph has more.
The UK has twice as many foreign doctors and nurses as the Western average, a report has revealed.
The study, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), found that in 2023, foreign-trained doctors made up 38.3% of the UK’s medical workforce, compared with an average of 19.6% across 28 developed and developing countries.
More recent data from the General Medical Council (GMC), which regulates doctors in the UK, found that number has continued to rise and now stands at 42%.
In contrast, in Germany, the figure is 15%, while in France it is 11%.
The influx of more than 20,000 foreign doctors a year to Britain has come as UK medical graduates struggle to secure training places.
Junior doctors, now called resident doctors, cited foreign medics taking limited speciality training places as one of the reasons for their pre-Christmas strike.
Stuart Andrew, the Conservative shadow health secretary, said the “growing reliance on foreign-trained healthcare professionals is a wake-up call”.
“As we bring in more from abroad, UK-trained doctors are left fighting for fewer spots,” he said. “To secure the future of our NHS, we must reform the system to not only recruit internationally but also invest in and prioritise domestic talent.”
Gareth Lyon, head of health and social care at the think tank Policy Exchange, said: “The UK needs to train more doctors and to establish more medical schools to train them.”
He said the Government was “relying on a quick fix of recruiting ever more clinicians from overseas” and could “secure a healthy return to the Exchequer of £260k to £505k for each student” by expanding the number of medical graduates it trained.
Hospitals are hiring heavily to fill vacancies across the health service, but the number of specialist training posts to become consultants has long been capped by successive governments, largely because of the short-term costs. Places are open to global competition.
As a result, British doctors can be left without a training place, even as trusts recruit from abroad to meet immediate staffing needs.
Worth reading in full.
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The Tories try to present every issue as one they knew nothing about, did nothing to foster and will not take responsibility for it.
The importation of foreign medics and the government restrictions on intake at UK medical and nursing schools was nothing to do with them, they imply. It has all begun since Starmer. Wasn’t done in their 14 glorious years.
Methinks they would do better to just keep quiet. Permanently.
I still struggle to decide which Tory PM did the most deliberate harm to Britain.
Cameron – for wanting to be the heir to Blair and with exception of Education reforms not doing a single thing that was Conservative (and yes he did have much many opportunities in between hugging huskies and Clegg).
May – for destroying the police force, derailing Brexit and the monumental stupidity and vanity of Net Zero.
Johnson – for his utter lack of vision, his massive Covid authoritarian overreach, immigration disaster, HS2 continuation etc
Sunak – for shirking every major decision which could have revived the Conservatives.
All of them spent our taxes like drunken sailors, all of them ran the Armed Forces into the ground.
I detest the lot of them and will not contemplate voting for them again.
It is the Oxbridge Civil Service. They are unelected and run the show. In the case of the Home Office they have said they will not apply the will of the people with regard to Brexit or stopping the migrants.
George Orwell observed that our intellectuals have a tendency to hate their won nation.
We read and hear about that a lot. There is undoubtedly truth in it. However, the claim that all political decisions were stopped by the civil service is a convenient excuse for 14 years of failure.
Would you not think that at some point during those years a Minister even a PM would have publicly called out the offending individuals. They did not. I therefore conclude the Tories have over-stated the difficultes and understated their adherence to the Blair-Brown policies we suppose the civil service to promote and the evolving wokery and climate scare which they clearly embraced with enthusiasm.
Yes Minister comes to mind.
I know it is a typo, but sadly not far from the truth. We are struggling to hold on to our (almost) lost nation.
Yes. I meant ‘own’ but perhaps I meant ‘hard won’?
Could you perhaps once state what “proper brexing” is actually meant to be? The UK has – completely properly – left the EU. What else do you want? Set sail and become part of the Easter Islands archipelago?
“The UK has – completely properly – left the EU”
Sarcasm surely
Strangely, you didn’t answer the question.
Leaving the ECHR (and fixing the immigration problem), not aligning with EU Food/Farming regulations, not joining an EU military organisation, not sending bucket loads of money to Ukraine, repealing NET Zero policies AND restart North Sea Oil/Gas, start test fraccing (and developing) the Bowland Shale, start building some gas and coal-fired power stations, continue to develop the metallurgical coal mine (around Northumberland) for steel production.
And that’s just for a start.
Clearly the places they are coming from don’t need their services. They train them and then they leave. These doctors clearly have little loyalty in them.
Well it does expose the people who import these people as liars who don’t really care about the poor. If they did want to help alleviate poverty and deprivation from poorer countries they would train medics in the UK and export them to help out poor countries. That alone labels them as utterly careless individuals who are operating on a different agenda which as it turns out makes us and the other countries poorer. They are the most disgusting of people.
They get a chance of a government job for life while living in the UK and with a guaranteed salary that’s certainly much higher than anything they could ever hope to earn in their home countries. These are a number of very compelling reasons for taking up such a job. On top of that, insofar they come from Africa, chances are that their home country isn’t really a country at all, just a former administrative district of the empire now ruled by local gangsters (+/-). That doesn’t exactly beget patriotism and why should it?
Spend less on training AND increase immigration – what’s not to like? Kills two pensioners with one stone.
I will never, ever trust ANYONE who says ‘our NHS’.
Britain does not rely on foreign doctors as we are taking foreign doctors in preference to ethnic UK trained doctors. On holiday we met two young ethnic UK doctors that were unable to find work. I also know a midwife who noticed that she is only training foreign people to be mid-wives here.
What you’ll never here from the alleged ‘left’, nor from the intolerant authoritarians masquerading as progressives that make up most of the lanyard class, is the fact that poaching workers from poorer nations who educate and train their workforces at great expense, only for them to then disappear abroad, keeps those nations poor. Call me old fashioned, but I’m not convinced that cheering on the exploitation of cheap labour, nor effectively applauding the hollowing out of third world economies was ever left wing. Smug, privileged retards, the lot of them.
Thanks to Laurie Wastell & the DS for featuring this appalling news from the Telegraph, which many of us would never have seen otherwise.
Here is another result of this policy:
Bad Medicine I: The Sickening Truth About Britain’s Foreign ‘Doctors’ – The Occidental Observer
Bad Medicine II: The Escalating Problem of Third World Doctors – The Occidental Observer
It ties in with the bizarre decision by the Tories to close down THREE of Britain’s largest dental schools in the 1980s, after Prime Minister Thatcher declared that there were “too many dentists”. Rather like Prime Minister Cameron declaring that there were “too many white faces” in Parliament.
As others have noted, all these things are DELIBERATE TREASON against the Indigenous Ethnic European people whose ancestors built the West into great nations.
it strange, I thought that bringing in millions of immigrants would remove the need to poach medical staff from poorer countries. After all mass immigration is supposed to be a massive positive for the country.
Nice to read about a sensible proposal, if only for a change. The government certainly shouldn’t prioritize hiring from abroad over training locally for government jobs because of “cost savings”, especially not when hiring from abroad will usually imply permanent immigration.
We’re constantly told that our world-leading NHS would collapse without the wonderful foreigners. If we only have HALF the “western average” then we can only assume that the health services of many other western nations are already collapsing.
I think the argument is that the NHS would collapse weren’t it for all the foreigners already hired by it. That’s obviously true because there’s no trained native reserve army waiting to take over for them. But that’s no justification for continuing present hiring practices. In my opinion, government (and this includes the NHS) shouldn’t usually employ foreigners and certainly shouldn’t import them just to employ them instead of locals unless that’s demonstrably impossible. This is, after all, the government of Great Britain and British people certainly have every right to expect that their government is run by other British people. Otherwise, it would be some kind of foreign occupation government.
That’s a kind of positive discrimination I’m absolutely in favour of. After all, I also expect to interact with Germans when getting in contact with some part of German government.
Yes, all very good points. Though I’d employ you in public service – I think you love this country more than some native Brits, sad to say.
There are plenty of natives ready to train, but the numbers are restricted:
“David Sochart, from Manchester and Salford, warned that in the current job climate allowing too many new doctors into the market would risk devaluing the profession and make newly qualified doctors prey to “unscrupulous profiteers.” A glut of doctors would undermine competition and would therefore lower standards and ensure mediocrity, he claimed.”
https://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a748
I don’t know if circumstances have changed since then.
Knowledge and skills may be the same but does their upbringing endow them with “British values”