This is from the House of Commons Library:
As they summarise it:
And Dido Harding wants to reduce dependence on 'foreigners' in the NHS.
Let me leave the ethics aside for a moment - and that is hard. Instead, just consider the feasibility. To train the replacement staff would cost £42 billion and many years. And she does not even provide a good reason for doing this. A good reason might be to discourage people leaving their home country's health system. But that would require support for that system, which she knows this country is not providing. So we are back to the ethics f this. And they stink. Her comment ts are inexcusable.
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“To train the replacement staff would cost £42 billion and many years.”
You’re quite right. We should let other countries spend that £42bn and then poach the staff!
People who say that’s exploiting other countries many of which can not afford to lose their doctors are missing the point.
This is a fair point
But it was nit the one Harding was making
In excusable and typically Neo-liberal ignorance.
From a housing perspective it was the relaxation of rent controls in the early 80’s in this country that started the decline of nursing as a profession and the need to recruit other people’s trained staff – trainee nurses need somewhere to live on the pittance they were paid and their protected rents were essentially sacrificed to create the current market.
It’s the same in social care. I remember a documentary about BREXIT and how care home patients who had voted for BREXIT were asked if they realised that their lovely foreign staff were more likely to go home as a result. Those interviewed did not.
The journalist then went out on the street in the same Southern town and asked some English folk if they’d work in social care.
You can imagine the reaction with one chap saying that he was not wiping anyone’s bottom for minimum wage unless it was £15+ per hour.
And there you go – right to the heart of the problem – Harding gets paid huge amounts of money for God knows what and we only want to look after our elderly paying the most niggardly rates as possible.
Insanity.
What I feel needs urgently rectified is ‘across the board’ pay rises in the NHS.
To me it is inherently unfair that a Staff Nurse on c£30,000 pa and a Nursing Assistant on c£18000 gets the same pay rise as top management on £150,000 pa.
Just another small example of how wealth inequality is created and morale continues to plummet.
Surely it’s not too much to ask for a sliding scale to be introduced.
Or am I living in cloud cuckoo land?
It does slide- as in most other workplaces- just in the wrong direction ie there is a 5% pay rise, but 5% of £100k or 5% of £30k or £18k are hugely different and it just exacerbates the pay differentials. its been going on for years and no-one seems to want to do anything about it. Much better to give a flat rate pay rise of £X per week.
Conservatives can’t even get their own twisted ideologies to join up coherently. To replace overseas doctors with UK trained ones will firstly require an uplift in general education standards, which has to be state funded as the existing market for education privately doesn’t produce enough who wish to be doctors. A huge increase in the cost of ordinary and higher education. Secondly the salaries of doctors will need to be increased to ensure that those currently diverting into more lucrative finance jobs can be persuaded to switch to a job hugely more stressful with considerably longer hours and much poorer lunches.
In non-clinical roles and care where overseas workers seem willing to work but British workers are not it is likely that current rates of pay will need to be much higher to induce them to switch.
So even if the current cost is £42 bn this must be a gross under estimate because the current cost structure doesn’t produce the outcome they desire.
As the NHS is such a large employer the change in the cost structure required to produce this folly will have knock on effects for other employers having to increase their wage rates to retain staff that the whole economy will get distorted. The dreaded spectre of inflation, which Tories fear so much, will be likely given the spiralling wage costs.
Let’s not kid ourselves. The real ideology around this is to scrap a state funded health system, introduce a US style insurance scheme where only those in jobs or who can afford it get treatment and take out a large segment of poorer people who will get either zero or limited cover. The justice system is already in this state and health is going the same way.
Much to agree with
It brings to mind Keynes point about let our goods be homespun but things like hospitality should be for the world.
Personally I think we should train as many people as the NHS needs, BUT we should be keen to ensure British trained staff spend some time abroad to broaden their experience and at the same time welcome medical staff from abroad for the same reasons.
That and of course significantly improve the pay and conditions of those at the bottom of the NHS/Care system so we dont have to recruit from abroad
“Dido Harding wants to reduce dependence on ‘foreigners’ in the NHS”
Moving on to the substance, since it is toryscum policy to make it costly to become, for example, a nurse, then it is clear that less foreigners (and ferwer homegrowns) means a poorer NHS service. This will then allow the toryscum to claim the NHS is “not working” (toryscum do like that phrase don’t they?) and thus gives them reason for more privatisation. Harding’s husband is all in favour of this & thus the trajectory is set. In be times, there is dead silence from Liebore/Starmer on this subject, which suggests that Liebore now has the function of an “oppositional doormat” – something for toryscum to wipe their feet on.
In fairness, UK serfs in their droves voted for this, with help from the UK meeja (which fails to hold anything or anybody to account).
Just to add some more numbers: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/record-number-of-nhs-doctors-and-nurses-in-england
“as of January 2021, there are a total of 123,813 doctors and 301,491 nurses working in the NHS.” (that is full time equivalents)
So on the basis of 1.28 million NHS staff, that is about 10% doctors, 25% nurses, and 65% other roles.
Do we know how the 15% from other countries breaks down between the various roles? We are going to struggle to replace many of the qualified doctors any quicker than 6 years or qualified nurses in shorter than 3 or 4 years.