UK’s troubled recruitment of foreign doctors

The UK has relied much more than the U.S. on foreign doctors (“foreign trained” very roughly equals “foreign born”).  About half of doctors practicing in the UK are foreign trained compared to 25% in the United States. In contrast to the U.S, the share in the UK has grown noticeably in recently.  Volatile trends in special recruitment by the National Health Service shows how much the terms of temporary immigration matter.

After World War II, the National Health Service faced harsh workforce shortages and actively recruited medical professionals from abroad, particularly from Commonwealth countries such as India and Pakistan.

A special Health and Care Worker visa was created in 2020. This provides for five years of work and after then an option to become a British citizen. In 2023, 350,000 such visas were issued (I think this includes the primary person and dependents). But the government stopped allowing workers to bring dependents, and the number in 2024 dropped to 50,000.

Today, the NHS is experiencing a shortage of health care professionals. The job vacancy rate which used to be about 2 jobs unfilled for every 100 jobs. That jumped to over 4 jobs per 100 after the pandemic.

From a 2024 report. This profile has been pretty much unchanged for at least 10 years, although sone sources say that immigration of health professionals has very recently picked up.

In 2021, 51% of junior doctors and 41% of senior doctors (called consultants) were non-white. This compares with 20% of the English working-age population. Much of this is driven by international recruitment. But even among UK-trained doctors, 37% of junior doctors and 24% of consultants were non-white.

By far the largest non-White group is Asian, making up 33% of junior doctors and 32% of consultants in 2021. The share of non-white senior doctors also increased, from 39% in 2012 to 45% in 2021.

India has been the world’s largest source of immigrant physicians.

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