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As you might have seen, doctors are due to strike again (despite record pay rises). For many of us, this won’t make a difference, as seeing a doctor or even your local GP is already a Herculean task.
But why has the service provided by the NHS become so poor?
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, respected former consultant surgeon J Meirion Thomas asserts:
“In 2024, the UK graduated 9,285 doctors, and registered 19,279 doctors from abroad. Of the latter, 2,366 were graduates from the European Economic Area and 16,913 were International Medical Graduates(IMGs) poached from low-income countries, mainly India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Egypt.”
Compounding the problem, some of these UK-trained doctors -no doubt looking at the state of our nation in despair – are emigrating to countries like the United States or Australia. In 2024, 10,685 doctors informed the General Medical Council they intended to practice medicine overseas, more than double the 5,152 who left in 2020.
In theory this isn’t a problem – as long as we have the doctors, does it matter where they came from?
Unfortunately, it does. In 2015, 72% of struck-off doctors were trained overseas. Recruiting from countries like Sudan, India and Ghana – with significantly different cultures, and questionable academic institutions – actively puts patients at risk of assault or medical malpractice.
Migration Watch has over many years drawn attention to this long standing problem. For example in this MW Briefing paper in which we proposed ways of increasing UK-born students entering the NHS.
Of course, the flip side is developing countries suffer “brain drain” as the medical students they produce end up migrating to the West. It’s impossible to calculate how much damage this does to local healthcare systems.
With the NHS budget skyrocketing to over £175 billion, it’s worth asking whether this merry-go-round of importing foreign doctors to offset our fleeing domestically trained doctors is good value for money.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every week as soon as it is released.