9/18/17 Daily Mail:
American physician assistants are being enticed over to the United Kingdom amid staffing shortages - with promises of long vacations in Europe.Physician associates, medical professionals who assist doctors in making a diagnosis and analyzing test results, train for two years, roughly a quarter of the training of a doctor.Comments at Instapundit point out that pay with NHS is about a third of US PA salaries; so much for student loan debt.
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This is one of the things that has long puzzled me. Canada and the UK both have single-payer health systems (by province in Canada) and in both places the medical education is also funded by the state, with the number of places at each medical school determined by the state.
ReplyDeleteYet both can't seem to train enough of their own doctors, nurses, etc to meet their own need, and are reduced to enticing foreign-trained foreigners (often from poor underserved countries) to relocate and practice in the UK.
While they cannot control which individuals leave practice in any given year, a national health service with 1.7 million employees (up from 1.4 million after 6 years of Tory cuts. . .) should have a statistical handle on what their personnel needs will be in 5 and 10 years and plan intake to match it. As they reject over 90% of applicants to MD programs, there are certainly enough qualified applicants that they could increase the number of course places, increase the number of students accepted, and in 4-5 years have the number of new "foundation" doctors (residents) that they need, and hence 5 years later after the competitive placement process the number of GPs and specialists that they need.
Instead, in the same 6 years that NHS forces have grown by 20%, the number of people accepted into training to become MDs has declined by 4%, with a mere 8% of applicants accepted instead of 10% or more as in years past.
I can't work out why this obvious lack of planning isn't a scandal, and why the poaching of MDs, physician-assistants, and RNs from medically underserved countries isn't a scandal.