25,000 Indian-origin British doctors to return to India

[Muzungu]

NEW DELHI: Nearly 25,000 British doctors of Indian origin are set to return to India within two to four years and some of them are "most likely to join the seven AIIMS-like institutions" proposed to be set up by the central government.

"There are around 15,000 young Indian-origin doctors undergoing training in different parts of Britain who will return to India," Ramesh Mehta, president of the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, told IANS.

"Also, at least 10,000 senior doctors of Indian origin who are retiring from their jobs in the UK, are set to return to India," said the doctor, currently on an Indian tour.

He said they have already talked to the Indian health ministry and have got a favourable response. "The government has allowed us to come back and practise."

He said the ministry told the association that there will be a problem in finding quality doctors to man the seven new medical colleges modelled after the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).

"We believe that these young doctors who are undergoing training in the UK currently, can be of great help in the new AIIMS-like institutes," he said.

The central government has given a go ahead to seven AIIMS-type medical institutions in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. Each of these institutes will come up with a cost of Rs.300 crore (Rs.3 billion).

Each new institution would have an 850-bed hospital, including superspecialty facilities and 39 departments covering all major disciplines of medicine. The medical colleges will also have the provision to take in 100 undergraduate students each per year as well as facilities for imparting Post Graduate and doctoral courses in various disciplines.

Mehta also said the Indian government's plan to start a three-and-a-half-year rural medical course can benefit from these British doctors. "We are ready to play a part in training doctors whom government will post in rural areas."

The health ministry and the Medical Council of India (MCI) have proposed to start a rural medical course called Bachelor of Rural Medicine and Surgery (BRMS) in district hospitals. This will help doctors to get posted in rural areas and improve the healthcare delivery system at village level.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/25000-Indian-origin-British-doctors-to-return-to-India/articleshow/5407439.cms

[gazell]

The NHS shall be pleased. They do not know where to get doctors from as it were, already.

[Connaught Ranger]

No doubt they will be replaced by another countries medical students in the same manner as the Indian medical students who came to the U.K. in 1950's 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, to the present date.

Only instead of relying upon what was perceived as a Third world country back in the 1950's, they will recruit from the former Eastern Bloc and Balkan countries.

[pg_ord]

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out health care in many parts of India is worse of then parts of Africa. I am glad this is happening. :)

I only hope they are spread out through out the country instead of just mushrooming in cities. :roll:

[big_les]

It's political correctness gone mad.

[pacifist]

Good for them.

[Flagg]

Interesting......

I do think it will be easier from some countries of ethnic origin to recruit back folks who have moved to and been educated in the 1st world....and I do think the UK is a bit more vulnerable than the US, Canada, OZ, or NZ....but I kinda reckon the story is a bit BS.

I've known a few and read a lot about some folks in the tech industries who have moved back to India and found it VERY difficult after a life in the west(US mostly).

It seems like there's a real risk of being caught between two worlds/cultures with potentially very difficult challenges...I know someone who has JUST moved over to India in similar circumstances and it will be keen to see how she adapts and finds her feet.

So I think there will be some trend towards specific ethnic re-immigration with some countries being far more appealing than others.....it's still far easier said than done.

The Bachelor's in Rural Medicine and Surgery sounds pretty cool as there is a global need(even in the wealthy west) to fill the hole of unaffordable and often simply inaccessible primary health care in rural communities from Oklahoma to a Bangladeshi backwater.

Much like India's efforts in the past decade to completely destroy the traditional western model(and cost structure) for routine cataract surgery....offering an incredibly cheap, but high quality procedure using manufacturing techniques and six-sigma fault & waste analysis.

I'm half expecting to see some of the biggest evolutions in healthcare to come from places like India.

In an global economic environment where we will need to accomplish far more with far less the future of health care may be more in extremely low fault level assembly line efficiency than in high tech high dollar experimental surgeries for the foreseeable future.

And it's here where a culture of doing more with less when combined with enough well educated folks and enough funding to focus on it could make some considerable strides.

[pg_ord]

Talking about affordable health care in India. Doctors are in severe shortage. There are few medical colleges around for the population the size of India. License to start new ones are hard to come by from Medical Council of India. Getting to study super speciality courses is even more tougher which makes existing crop to look for opportunities abroad.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/King-of-hearts-/articleshow/5404851.cms

Started eight years ago, 65 per cent of BPL card holders in Karnataka are covered under Shetty's Yeshasvini Microhealth Insurance Scheme, and all they pay is a monthly premium of Rs 10. Vijayamma, 35, who works as a coolie in Yelachenahalli, near bangalore[/URL], underwent a spine operation under the scheme recently, and is now back at work. "Imagine what I would have done without this," she said.

"The concept of the scheme was influenced by my childhood fascination for piggy banks and the idea of self funding," Shetty said, adding that it offers insurance on more than 1,600 surgical procedures that can be carried out at 113 network hospitals across 26 cities.

What also motivated Shetty to come up with this novel scheme was the high cost of [U]surgery (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/King-of-hearts-/articleshow/5404851.cms#) in India - Rs 2-3 lakh in metros - which makes it unaffordable for large sections of the population. But it all started when the Karnataka Milk Federation approached Shetty to endorse low-cost milk. "I agreed on the condition that KMF provide health insurance to farmers selling milk to them," says Shetty. Inspired by the success of the KFL scheme, the state government modified it and the outcome was Yeshasvini, which was launched in 2002.

Shetty started his career at the B M Birla Heart Research Centre, Kolkata, where over two decades he succeeded in bringing down the cost of a bypass surgery from Rs 1.2 lakh to Rs 75,000. In 2001, he established Narayana Hrudalaya, a multi-specialty hospital in Bangalore. Every day, 24 open-heart surgeries are performed at the hospital - eight times the average at other Indian hospitals. And many of these are carried out at much lower costs to accommodate poor patients.

However, Shetty is worried about the future. "There's a sharp gap between the demand and supply of doctors. We need to produce 1 lakh doctors every year, but as of now the number is just 32,000," he says. Knowing Shetty, he will come up with a solution for this one too.