Do you feel comfortable poaching health staff from the Philippines

They are key workers Nannan2. They are entitled to decent standard accommodation, not living in a multi occupancy nurses home with a room and a shared kitchen and bathroom. They aren’t students. However, they do not get allocated a three bedroom house for one nurse unless they pay the going market rate, usually several share, although one person may be the tenant. They do this to save money to send home. I think your estate agent has been feeding you porky pies.

UK-trained doctors do two years post-grad training as Foundation Years doctors, FY1 and FY2. They can then go on and socialise, if they wish. Of course, many of them have been working in hospitals and GP surgeries for years even by the time they graduate which is why I oppose any mandatory period of having to work for the NHS.

My dd worked in hospitals from six weeks into her first year. The final two years of undergrad training consists mainly of clinical work. At first students are very closely supervised but as they learn they are given more responsibility and take on more duties. They don’t do shifts but our hospitals would soon break down even more if students were unavailable to do some of the unglamorous work. They certainly don’t live a so-called typical student life of lazing in bed until midday and attending two hours of lectures a week.

My dd has herself been teaching undergrad medical students during her FY training - I reckon the NHS already gets their pound of flesh out of them by the time they’re in their mid-20’s.

You describe the situation very well SueDonim. As you said all doctors do two foundation years, F1 and F2. Only then can they choose to train to specialise, although many continue to apply for and work at a variety of temporary placements to continue to further their skills, and decide how they want to develop their career. I’ve said before on Gransnet, it took my daughter twelve years from starting university to qualified GP.

My daughter’s course was arranged differently than yours Sue. She did two full years in medical school, with some very limited patient contact, then a year doing her BofSc in which she specialised in Speech and Language Therapy, followed by three years Clinical Practice. She was at UCL and did clinical practice in a variety of London hospitals.

Yes, each med school has a different programme. Some, such as St Andrew’s and I believe Cambridge, do mainly lecture-based learning for the first two years then move on to clinical work.

My DD’s med school shoves ‘em into the wards at six weeks ? and unless they do an intercalated (she did) they learn from then on in clinical situations as well as in lecture halls. Her uni is regularly rated in the top five in the UK and people can often guess where she trained because of her style of working. I found that really interesting, actually, as young doctors can often guess where people trained according to certain characteristics!

Yes, Calistemon, but not to work for poor wages.

PS and not to go abroad to work because their own country is desperately poor. Desperately poor countries need all social ranks of their brightest and best more than we affluent Brits need them.

What Britain needs is home grown talent.

Well said Caleo. It simply doesn’t sit right with me to take qualified staff from other countries simply because we don’t want to pay to train our own. And yes, all countries have extremely well polished recruitment drives to get qualified staff from other countries. They don’t want unqualified staff, they want to poach qualified staff in order to avoid the cost of training their own! It may be an unpalatable fact to some people, but whichever way you put it, that is what is going on.

I trained at a London hospital in the seventies. In my class of 33 student nurses only 3 were were from the UK, 3 from Eire the rest were from all over the world including the Philipines. Some stayed after qualifying some went home. It's been going
on for years.

The staff weren’t press ganged. They weighed up the benefits and made their own decision. People have always had a desire to explore the world and learn from other cultures. Some are more adventurous than others.

My niece was “poached” by a US hospital but found it wasn’t all that had been promised. As an experienced, highly qualified nurse, she upset the management because a complaint was made when she refused to manicure the finger nails of a patient when she was busy working with another.

My main concern when working with Philipeno nurses was the poor level of English which made communication difficult and potentially dangerous when an emergency arose. The unnerving experience I had with this was the final straw. My reservations were ignored by line managers so I handed in my notice.

The Philipeno nurses walked out of the week’s compulsory training that I, and ALL others had to attend and, having been given free accommodation and flights etc, the majority of them took off for London when they found the pay was much better.

Sadly my daughter has found that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. The same problems in the GP service in this country are apparently much the same in New Zealand. They’re taking their time there to explore the country and experience a different culture before they return.
If nurses from other countries are being offered free flights and accommodation then that clearly shows poaching, it’s obviously not just a case of wanting to live and work in another culture. My daughter and her husband were given a massive relocation amount of money. If they simply wanted to explore the world I suspect they’d have gone long ago at their own expense.

The Philippine Government has a policy of allowing more medical staff to be trained than are needed at home.

They are then encouraged to take posts abroad to bring money back into the country. A cap is set on the number to ensure there is sufficient medical staff to meet the needs at home. (Bearing in mind that medical ad has to be paid for by the individual)

An estimated 200,00 trained medical staff are working in other non-medical jobs because there is no work for them in the Philippines.

There seems to be some sort of illusion that they would be working for nothing in the poorer areas, if they were not working abroad.

No, they have to make a living so just take other jobs if they cannot get a paid medical one or try to get a contract abroad.

I’ll say again. There is no poaching, if you mean depriving a country of medical staff. As in Madagascar, where I spent some time, there are more trained medical staff than there are jobs for them.

Cuba has long had an interesting medical training model, exporting staff to less well off countries and bringing people to Cuba to train. It’s not without its problems but overall it seems to have been a good thing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_medical_internationalism

You are of course entitled to your opinion Peasblosom as I am entitled to mine. You can say there’s no poaching all you like, it doesn’t make you corrrect.

We need to invest in training far more doctors, nurses and other medical professionals.

We can no longer rely on medically qualified staff from other countries, nor should we.

If it means cutiing down the number of undergraduate courses in PPE or media studies then that is what we should do.

Yes, yes, yes varian, that is exactly what we should do.

I guess I hoped a few facts might make you see things differently.

I really can’t see how it’s better for qualified medics to work in shops and leisure than be over here practicing their skills.

But yes, we see it differently ?

We certainly do need to invest more in training far more doctors and nurses and other medical professionals. My sister, who desperately wanted to be a doctor, stood no chance, because there simply wasn’t the money to support her. I’m sure there must be lots of young people today who equally can’t do that training because of lack of funding.
I’m not sure that people wanting to train in PPE (?) or media studies would automatically change to medicine if those courses weren’t available.
Are posters saying that we should tell medical staff from the Philippines that we don’t want them?

No Mollygo, we’re not saying that. I’ve found them to be extremely good at their jobs when I’ve been in hospital. We’re saying it’s immoral to poach them from poorer countries just so we don’t have to invest in training our own medics.
Medical students need extremely good grades (AAA,ABB, ABB) in their A level exams and the subjects need to be Science/Maths. A media studies student is highly unlikely to have studied those subjects or got such high grades, so it couldn’t be a straight swop. The student also needs to be committed to full time study/clinical practice. That means at least an 8 hour day for 5 days a week. In comparison my daughter’s friend at university had a total of three hours of lectures a week. My daughter? Full time!

Maddyone I totally agree about the need for training our own medics, and feel there should be more done to support the less well off students who are bright enough and would like to do the training.
One DD meets your prerequisites to have trained as a doctor, but we certainly couldn’t afford for her to do it.
I also agree that the qualifications for a media studies degree would not need to be so high.
I’m just not sure where it says that we deliberately train fewer medical personnel because we can ‘poach’ from poorer countries.

The demand by students for medicine courses far exceeds the number of places available, the UK would have no problem doubling or tripling the numbers. It’s not as easy as that, though, because you also need extra facilities, things like anatomy laboratories, clinical placements and people to teach and supervise them.

In Scotland there are pathways for disadvantaged students to apply for medicine which have been quite successful. There are also the physician associate 2yr post grad degrees, which I think could be a way forward. They can do a lot of what a doctor does, my dd says much of medicine at her junior level really isn’t rocket science and a PA could just as easily do what she does.

www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/medical-associate-professions/roles-medical-associate-professions/physician-associate

Training for Junior Doctors and undergrads takes a huge amount of time and energy indeed- from very experienced doctors who have to be specially trained and approved themselves- and done on top of 'normal' hours (whatever that is in medicine... btw part of the problem as it was the norm not that long ago for junior doctors to work up to 140 hrs a week).

140 hours a week? 20 hours a day? Surely not?

Sue you’re right, to vastly increase the number of medical school places couldn’t be done overnight. Facilities, trainers, etc would all need to be organised and funded. It would take several years, but as there are many A grade students, so long as their A levels were in the appropriate subjects, we could train many more doctors here in the UK. Obviously £9000 a year tuition fees will be an off put to many potential medics, especially since they have to pay for four of their 5/6 year training. It’s very sad that Mollygo’s daughter couldn’t go to train due to lack of funding. But that’s what we’re doing as a country, not training enough for our needs because it’s costly (though no one official would ever admit it) and importing medics from elsewhere instead.

So if only those whose parents are well enough off can train, and that’s been the case since well before I was born, without the medical staff keen to come to the UK we would be in a worse state than we are now.
The £9000 tuition fees aren’t the end if the matter either. There’s equipment, lodgings etc.

maddyone

Sue you’re right, to vastly increase the number of medical school places couldn’t be done overnight. Facilities, trainers, etc would all need to be organised and funded. It would take several years, but as there are many A grade students, so long as their A levels were in the appropriate subjects, we could train many more doctors here in the UK. Obviously £9000 a year tuition fees will be an off put to many potential medics, especially since they have to pay for four of their 5/6 year training. It’s very sad that Mollygo’s daughter couldn’t go to train due to lack of funding. But that’s what we’re doing as a country, not training enough for our needs because it’s costly (though no one official would ever admit it) and importing medics from elsewhere instead.

Totally false, anyone can apply and get funding if accepted at medical school, they just might not want the costs involved. Friends son, working class family has just been accepted into medical school, . Numbers for training places have increased since 2018, there are only so many jobs that a hospital trust can pay for, no good training excess Drs etc if trust can’t afford to employ them. In my set, only 4 of us were able to be employed at my trust. You forget also, many overseas students apply to train in the U.K., paying upfront, more money for Universities, but then reducing the places for home grown potential Drs and Nurses. It’s not black and white as many on here seem to think.