By the end of November, 330 doctors, 20 nurses, and 50 key policy makers from Iraq will have passed through the United Kingdom on a unique training programme designed to kick start the rebuilding of the country’s health system. Shadowing doctors in the NHS, the selected group of Iraqi doctors, most of them surgeons, are already passing on the skills they learnt during their visits to colleagues back home.

The Iraq Clinical Training and Development Programme is a response by the Department of Health to the conundrum of how to rebuild a health system from the rubble left by 30 years of war, invasions, sanctions, and civil unrest.

Once a beacon of excellence in the Middle East, Iraq’s health service collapsed towards the end of the 1970s and is currently in need of a $1000bn investment to establish a functioning infrastructure, said Adel Abdullah, inspector general of the country’s Ministry …