Scarce resources, immigration and the NHS

Our first few lessons with the new AS Economics students this year were based on the excellent NHS resources suggested by Ben Cahill and Geoff.

The class discussion that these generated was terrific, with the students coming up with a wide range of ideas and questions that led us through many aspects which they will cover in depth over the next two years. One issue was the scarcity of qualified doctors, and the opportunity that immigrant labour gives to increase the ‘labour’ factor of production, and so shift the production possibility boundary to the right - which also touched on regulation in terms of ensuring that doctors who have qualified abroad do match up to the high entry requirements and depth of study for UK medical students. So it will be interesting to discuss with that group today, reports on the BBC this morning that the General Medical Council is concerned that doctors who qualify abroad need more support and induction training on arrival in the UK.

One third of the doctors employed in the NHS qualified abroad. Without them, queues for the services the NHS provides would be much longer and we rely on them to expand the capacity of the service. The GMC’s report draws on a wide range of data including doctors’ surveys and patients’ complaints, and concludes that many overseas doctors have problems adjusting to a different cultural, ethical and professional environment in the UK. One example is the regulation by which the NHS is prevented under European law from providing language checks on doctors from the EEA. The reports also say that doctors need help in understanding how the NHS actually works, its structure and the interrelationships of the different bodies within the service.

It seems pretty extraordinary that an employer which employs 89,000 staff from overseas would not have thought of offering basic induction training when those staff first arrive - but putting that to one side, hopefully now that the issue has been raised, the employer will find use of resources to provide that training more efficient than dealing with the patient complaints and difficulties that the absence of the training creates