12/16/2012
Re: A Reader Asks Why An Immigrant Nurse (From India) Was Attending To A British Royal Pregnancy
From: An Anonymous English Reader
In James Fulford’s reply to a reader’s letter about the Indian nurse who committed suicide after the radio show prank, Fulford said "Britain’s National Health system, which has been importing foreign doctors since the 1940s to provide free health care cheaply".
Well, I am in the UK, and of course I do notice that a disproportionate number of doctors and nurses are Indian. But if this to provide free healthcare cheaply?
I don’t think so. All the doctors had a virtually doubling of their salary at one point in the Labour administration, with a reduction in their hours. The general practitioners (primary care doctors) used to have to do 24-hour callouts and could easily be seen by queuing in the surgery. Now they don’t do callouts, it takes 7-14 days to get an appointment to see them, and their salaries are all astronomic — paid for out of the public purse. The medical system works to the benefit of the health workers — not the patients. There has been much discussion in our newspapers of this and of how rude and officious doctors and nurses are today.
The problem is probably that we send 50% of our own young people to university, but we have dumbed down the education system so much, most of them are going to do Mickey Mouse degrees, so, whereas we could and should be producing enough doctors of our own, we don’t, and we still need immigrants to do the jobs.
As for nurses, well, most young English women don’t want to do anything unglamorous, like cleaning up vomit. The type of nursing they are interested in is shown by the fact that nursing is a degree subject in England today — they are nurses with the power to prescribe pills or nurses with some specialism — but not nurses who clean wards, and definitely not nurses who maintain their wards bug-free. So beyond a certain point, only immigrant nurses are prepared to any of the hard work that real nursing entails.
It is very frustrating that our culture has developed along these lines. In the US, welfarism is very ethnic, and a much lower proportion of white people are on welfare. In the UK, welfare includes many ethnic people of course, but also includes a huge white underclass — whose reluctance to work has been used to justify immigration "to do the jobs English people would rather sit on welfare and not do".
My local GP has been replaced by a Sikh — and I find this unpalatable, as there are some personal medical matters you would not want to discuss with a member of another race. At the very least, it is my decision if I feel that that is the case, but the state-provided medical system means you have no choose — you are assigned to ethnic doctors, whose standards of care are much more variable, as shown in hundreds of anecdotal press reports.
It seems to me a new racial pecking order is being created, where English people are on welfare and at the bottom of the pile, while immigrants from India and elsewhere flood in and take the well-paying jobs, paid for at taxpayer expense. It has taken a range of policies to achieve this, including education policy, health policy, welfare policy, and the employment rights circus that means that young English people cannot be ordered about by matrons [=Head Nurses in US] in hospital in the way that nurses once were.
As far as I am concerned these ethnic doctors and nurses are all scroungers — but it is not just immigration policy, but a number of other interlocking policies that would need to be changed in order to move to a situation where we could provide for our own qualified healthcare personnel needs.
By James Fulford writes: I linked in my reply to a policy paper titled Immigration and the National Health Service: putting history to the forefront. [By Stephanie Snow and Emma Jones]
Cost is only one of the reasons for importing doctors. The medical profession in both Britain and the US deliberately limits the number of doctors who go to medical school, for fear of “overproduction” which could lead to a fall in price. Something like that happened in the 1950s. Amusingly, one of the early adopters of “Asian” doctors, starting in 1963, was Health Minister Enoch Powell. ['Enoch Powell was not an out-and-out racist' | Sanjeev Bhasjar and producer Tom Ware on their new BBC One drama that aims to remind us how Powell promoted Asian immigration, By Vicki Power, BBC, November12, 2010]
But in the end it all comes down to costs — immigrant doctors are sent to industrial areas that British doctors don’t want to go to because they’re not being paid enough. Immigrants do jobs that Britons won’t do because they’re not being paid enough. Doctors are emigrating from Britain for higher pay and better working conditions.
And when the UK Department of Health tried to keep junior medical posts open for British and European doctors, something called the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO) took them to court and had this policy declared illegal.
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