India exporting nurses to UK and US

The Hindu
Thursday, September 23, 2004

Indraprasth, Sept.23 (Guardian News Service) -- From
hearsay and a single photograph, staff nurse Sabitha
Nambiar has a mental picture of Antrim, in the north of
Northern Ireland. It is soon to be her home and, in her
mind, it is very much like Shillong -- a hill station in
Meghalaya, north-east India's tea growing region -- with
Victorian bungalows, the world's wettest championship
golf course, and daily power cuts. All she knows for sure
are the maths. In Britain, nurses earn in one year what
in India takes them a decade to earn.

Before her night shift, over sweet tea, the din of car
horns and a monsoon downpour in central Delhi, Nambiar
explains that the idea of working in Britain came from
her cousin, a nurse who left India to work in a private
nursing home.

''My cousin in Surrey (south-east England) told me the
experience is better than working in India,'' she says.

''There's a higher standard of living. I also thought I'd
benefit from mingling with different sorts of people. I'm
totally ignorant about Ireland. I'm told it's not like
London. That it's much slower. That it's green and
pleasant.''

Nambiar, who is planning to arrive in Antrim by the end
of the year, is fast becoming the modern face of nursing
in Britain. Four years ago, just 30 Indian nurses were
registered to work in the UK.

Today, more than 2,000 have registered. For the UK's
health service (NHS), India is one of the main areas
where it can poach health workers.

Britain imports nurses because it does not have enough,
and because India, according to its government, has too
many -- more than 8 million today, against 3.8 million 10
years ago.

The country also has an edge over many other developing
nations; English is widely spoken and it has a ''youth
bulge'', with more than half the population under 30.

Getting to the UK is not easy. With guidance from her
cousin, Nambiar jumped with relative ease the two crucial
hurdles that enable Indian nurses to apply for jobs in
Britain -- provisional registration with the UK's Nursing
and Midwifery Council and achieving the necessary grade
in an international English language test.

While controversy in Britain over poaching nurses from
the developing world last month prompted health ministers
to accept that the NHS should leave sub-Saharan Africa's
scarce supply of health workers alone, India's nursing
workforce -- thanks to an intergovernmental agreement --
is still fair game. India has, officially, a surplus of
nurses. But even so, some hospitals are beginning to feel
the strain.

To work in the NHS, nurses need at least three years'
general nursing experience.

Several nursing directors in India stated that poaching
means hospitals are perpetually training nurses they
barely get to use. ''I feel we train them, then we lose
them,'' says Sudesh David, nursing superintendent of the
prestigious Christian Medical College hospital in
Ludhiana, Punjab.

In the past four years, the hospital has seen at least 50
of its 430 nurses go to the UK each year.

The migration of nurses may have costs for India's health
system, but it is also becoming big business. Outsourcing
and nursing labour are new corporate buzzwords.

Private hospitals are setting up companies for the sole
purpose of grooming Indian nurses for foreign export.
There has been a huge increase in the number of training
schools in India compared with a decade ago, when there
were only 60.

Companies have built centres and hired language and
cultural etiquette coaches to school local nurses in the
ways of developed world nursing. They are chasing
contracts -- big ones -- and making deals to supply
nurses to hospitals thousands of miles away.

One hospital group, Apollo Life, has contracted a company
that prepared IT and call centre workers to teach nurses
headed for the US in ''voice and accent neutralising'',
''presentation skills'' and ''dining etiquette''.
Britain, which has long dominated the poaching game, will
face stiff competition for nursing labour.

Among Indian nurses, the US is increasingly becoming the
country of choice. It grants them the elusive green card
and, it is believed, a better living standard than in
Britain.

More at:
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