Christian Medical Fellowship calls for NHS to stop taking medics from countries which need them

May 19, 2019 by Andrew Symes

by Cara Bentley, Premier.

The NHS have been accused of taking one in four medics from countries that are in dire need of their own health professionals.

There are 97 countries which have been identified by the UK departments for Health and Social Care and that of International Development that ‘should not be actively recruited from’, including Pakistan, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Myanmar and Zimbabwe.

According to the Daily Telegraph, the number of doctors and nurses being recruited from these countries though is in breach of the NHS’s ethical rules – for example, 3,413 doctors were recruited from Pakistan betweeen 2014-2019.

Steve Fouch from the Christian Medical Fellowship said this was happening becuase of a global shortage of medical professionals, as well as midwives and nurses, so the UK are looking elsewhere.

“So we’ve got a problem with training people and keeping people which means we are running about 10% short on all nursing vacancies across the country and, in some places, it’s a lot higher – and almost as bad as that with medical vacancies, especially for junior doctors. So, we are in quite a difficult situation at the moment.”

He continued: “If we end up with, as actually did happen, most of the nurses and doctors from Malawi were working in the UK at one stage and a significant proportion of nurses and doctors from Zimbabwe likewise, who’s going to actually staff the health care system, the hospitals, GP surgeries and everything else in those countries if we’ve taken all of their own health professionals to work here?

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