Doctors quit dirty NHS for India

THE TIMES, UK
THE AUSTRALIAN
Sunday, December 16, 2007

The influx of thousands of Indian doctors into the National
Health Service is going into reverse. Hospitals in India
are now said to be cleaner and better equipped than many in
Britain and doctors are quitting the NHS to work there
instead.

The director of one of India's biggest private hospital
chains said he was receiving five job applications a week
from NHS doctors and that half his 3,000 consultants were
from Britain.

"There's a feeling that India's time has come and there's a
huge need for these people to come back," Anupam Sibal,
director of the Apollo hospital in Delhi, said yesterday.

Doctors say they are moving to India because of its
economy, state of the art equipment, higher standards than
the NHS and a better quality of life. In particular, they
say hospitals in India, which many Britons still imagine to
be impoverished and dirty, suffer less from hospital-
acquired infections such as MRSA.

India has no equivalent of the NHS but there has been a
boom in private hospitals that resemble luxury hotels, with
marble foyers and corridors mopped by an army of liveried
cleaners.

One of those who has made the transition is Mahesh Kul-
karni, an orthopaedic surgeon, who left Bristol Royal
Infirmary after 10 years in Britain. He is now a consultant
at the Aditya Birla Memorial hospital in Pune.

"The hospitals are better than in Britain," he said. "This
hospital is spotless and clean compared with the old
hospitals in the UK, some of which are more than 100 years
old. I started in January this year and I have not seen
MRSA here yet.

"It's had a lot of investment, and things I couldn't do in
Britain I can do here. We have ‘clean air' operating
theatres (that remove dust from the air), and our intensive
care unit here is fully equipped with special monitoring
instruments.

"When I went to England 10 years ago, India was 10 years
behind Britain. Now there's hardly any difference."

Bristol Royal Infirmary defended its record, saying there
had been a 35% increase in spending on new equipment and
that its latest inspection had found cleanliness was
"acceptable".

Ameet Kishore had worked as an ear, nose and throat
consultant in Glasgow Royal Infirmary for 12 years when he
moved to the Apollo hospital in Delhi two years ago.
Although reluctant to criticise the NHS, which had taught
him so much, he said that the new Indian hospitals were
cleaner and better resourced.

He contrasted the number of cochlear implant operations
that he could perform: at Crosshouse hospital, Kilmarnock,
the main ENT centre for the west of Scotland, he was
limited to 40 a year; in Delhi he had done 70 in the past
six months.

Other doctors cite new European Union rules for their
decision to move. Shailendra Magdum, a specialist registrar
in neurosurgery at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford until he
left for India in August last year, said that rules
favouring EU doctors over Indians had played a part.

The EU's working time directive had also lowered NHS
standards, he added, by restricting the amount of time that
young doctors could spend on the wards.

"For a neurosurgeon to be good you have to spend a lot of
time on the wards, but in Britain the working time
directive is running down training," he said.

Although salaries are usually lower in India, doctors are
finding that their standard of living is better. Kishore
said he lived in a bigger house with a driver, cleaner,
cook, nanny and watchman to look after him, his wife and
two young children.

- The Times

More at:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22932525-2703,00.html

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