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Rapid Responses: Rapid Responses published:
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Should overseas doctors consider their future in UK?
- Raouf Daoud (10 May 2004)
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Postgraduate Medical Education Training Board
- Evan Aled Bayton (11 May 2004)
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Raouf Daoud, Consultant surgeon Frimley Park Hospital NHS Trust, Portsmouth Rd, Camberley, Surrey, GU16 7UJ
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I read with interest the debate on surgical training and working time directive. I was surprised to read the last comment by Dr Lauren Ovens about overseas trainees. I would like to make the following comments: 1. There are thousands of overseas trainees working in the Uk especially in places not very attractive to British qualified trainees. If they go these place will simply close. 2. To suggest they should review their future in the Uk is counterproductive. It will not help the NHS if they decided to leave because of the quality of training. If Britain is seen as providing poor training this will be a great shame for the profession and Royal Colleges. We should develop ways of maximising training for local and overseas candidates alike for everybody's benefit. 3. Many overseas doctors have made outstanding careers in the UK. Let us not forget Sir Magdy Yacoub, who took cardiac surgery into the 21st century. This is only one example. I do not expect the road is paved for overseas candidates; rather they face fierce competition. Some have outstanding qualities and a lot to offer the healthsevice in the UK. 4. The expansion of the EU will bring more overseas doctors to the Uk, and help our shortage, let us not put them off. As the slow long awaited expansion of the consultant grade takes place, we desperately need overseas doctors, who seek to gain experience here for sometime and go back to benefit the health services in their homeland. 5. Finally, does Dr Ovens raelly has no competing interests? or is he/she not actually competing with these overseas doctors for junior posts? R Daoud
Competing interests: None declared |
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Evan Aled Bayton, A&E Burnley, Lancashire Burnley General Hospital BB10 2PQ
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EDITOR-No time to train the surgeons is a special case of a specific difficulty inherent in the new PGMTB set-up. Careful inspection of the arrangements for the new PGMTB shows that it is almost entirely composed of members who represent specialties in which the acquisition of practical skills (the logbook model) is not the main feature of training. Not all of these specialties are surgical - cardiology, gastroenterology, radiology, and others such as A&E have a major component where practical skills are essential to good clinical practice. The combination of this inferior and shoddy set-up with the downgraded undergraduate medical school syllabus should ensure that British graduates will not only be unable to function even at the most basic level but also will not have qualifications recognised in other countries around the world. The time has come to recognise that there will be a different medical career structure in the future where career progression continues after initial postgraduate training. The current proposals for a CST represent a level of training equivalent to the end of General Professional Training under the current model - that is the end of SHO level work and the eligibility for appointment to a registrar job. Obviously such a level of certification will in no way create "specialists" fit to be appointed to autonomous practice but rather doctors who are capable of determining their own competence and asking for expert help where relevant much as current GP training is organised now. Competing interests: I am a fully trained registered medical practitioner. |
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