[Decky]

I agree, Kaiser. What we need to tackle is the reason why British workers are not getting into the profession.

Wages, why do right wing people not grasp this? Have you never had jobs? The only reason someone would do a shit a job with long hours and terrible condition is if the money is right.

You need to pick, what do you capitalist faux patirot types love more? A) being able to continue paying slave wages and having to import slaves to make it work or B) paying decent wages and having British workers. There is no middle ground. So far you have picked A every time you have been in the position to choose.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

I agree, Kaiser. What we need to tackle is the reason why British workers are not getting into the profession. However I suspect part of it is cyclical in nature. With so many immigrants arriving in the UK, British workers were insufficient to fill the gap so more foreigners were brought in, thus requiring yet more jobs in the healthcare industry.

Yes, immigrants will create their own demand in health care as well as other areas. I'm not sure how big the gap is though. A lot of Brits leave the country and the main beneficiaries seem to be other English speaking countries. Looking at OECD stats, there were some 13,000 British trained doctors in Australia, the US, NZ and Canada in 2016. In comparison the number of doctors from those countries working in the UK was less than 1,000, with the vast majority from Australia and NZ. Their numbers have also decreased over the last 10 years. It's probably as much a matter of retaining your trained health care professionals as getting more people in the professions.

Both are eminently feasible. The NZ military also gets lots of trained Brits but only lets 10% non-Kiwis join, so they have to actively recruit. Like most armed forces, applicants have to commit for a few years and get free training and/or a qualification in return. I think a similar carrot and stick approach would do the trick and there have been proposals along those lines over the years in Britain although as far as I'm aware they have never been implemented.

OECD

It wont break down but it will suffer some damage.(By some i mean i am not sure how much) There is obviously a solution to this but this is a long time issue and not something that you can fix within 1 or 2 years. Which is the point i was trying to make. This is actually a good example how Brexit will affect different sectors of economy. It is not that it will fully destroy the UK but it will cause some damage. The damage can be obviously repaired over time but is it all worth it honestly?

I think it would be worth it regardless of Brexit, not only for the receiving countries but also on balance for the senders. If you believe authorities in developed countries then there will be a shortage of health care workers in general which would need to be addressed anyway. The only problem I see here is that western governments have taken a more or less hands-off approach or even welcomed this, often on ideological grounds such as that there are great gains to be had from some ill-defined diversity dividend.

I don't think that the UK would have problems attracting doctors and other health care professionals anyway. One reason for the increase in EU-migrants among those professions is that they get preferential treatment due to free movement in the EU. The UK can still make immigration easy from within and outside the EU and, if it chooses, slowly reduce their proportion over time. I'm not advocating some radical change in policy but I think it's worth asking the question whether we should be so dependent on immigration in this area and lose so many people to other countries. The latter question is obviously currently more important to countries in Eastern Europe.

It's quite simple, kaiserchmarnn.

France spends a significantly larger percentage of GDP on national healthcare.

The Tories are doing their best to make the NHS so inefficient by starving it of cash, that the general public will become resigned to selling it off to American insurance companies.

Training nurses and doctors is expensive and very time consuming. Obviously, it's much cheaper and quicker to recruit ready trained medical staff.

That is the bottom line.

That's one part of it but doesn't explain it entirely. For instance, Switzerland and Sweden have a similar percentage of foreign-trained doctors to Britain despite spending a larger percentage of GDP on healthcare.

[Thompson_NCL]

Wages, why do right wing people not grasp this? Have you never had jobs? :?: The only reason someone would do a shit a job with long hours and terrible condition is if the money is right.

You need to pick, what do you capitalist faux patirot types love more? A) being able to continue paying slave wages and having to import slaves to make it work or B) paying decent wages and having British workers. There is no middle ground. So far you have picked A every time you have been in the position to choose.

I've been working for nearly 20 years. I seem to recall you've only been employed for about 12-18 months?

[Decky]

You seem to recal wrongly, still I hear the sense of time is one of the first thing to go in geriatrics.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Wages are not the problem in this case, perhaps with the exception of the care sector. UK GPs are well compensated, e.g. they earn twice as much as GPs in Germany.

[snapdragon]

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 38571.html

This article is a few years old, but still relevant.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

^ I would expect GPs to try and resist more work and less pay, so the claims in the article are not surprising.

In 2004 they negotiated less work and more pay, leading to them being rather well-compensated compared to Continental Europe. According to the Guardian, they earned more than GPs in any other OECD counrty and twice as much as GPs in France in 2011 (not Germany as I said in my last post), while the pay of specialists and nurses was OECD average.