China Saves the World's Public Health Systems

A rather amazing story from China

Here in Suzhou there are at least 500 Indian and Pakistani students studying medicine. They study in English but learn a little survival Chinese as well. They are amongst 10,000 such students studying medicine in China.

At first there was a guarante their credentials would be recognised in India but it appears the Indian government may have reneged on that assurance. In place is a system of further examination, once they return, which will admit them to practice in Australia, the US or the UK. Just another hurdle.

In discussion with these students, I was rather negative about their opportunities for work in Australia. The AMA used to have extremely high standards for doctors and if you did not graduate from an Australian medical school, you were subject to a battery of examinations which replicated those standards.

But of course I was out of date. The advent of free health services in Australia massively increased the demand for medical services which the Australian schools were not able to handle without lowering standards.

The demand was especially high in public hospitals where the working conditions and pay were unattractice to doctors who had studied for nearly six years and who where the cream of the academic crop. As a result the Australian government has turned to 'foreign' doctors - mostly from the Subcontinent who have similar training regimes. They still require would-be doctors to sit for an admission exam to ensure quality but it has become manifest that they have become the mainstay of our public hospital system.

The recent failed London bombings had a sideshow in Australia where a relative of two of the bombers, a doctor in a Gold Coast hospital, was arrested and investigated under terrorism laws. Despite the bombers having a phone chip from the good doctor, a list of strange phone calls from India, and his attempt to leave Australia without notice to his employers with a one-way ticket to India, he was eventually returned to India and effectively absolved of any guilt in the plot.

The new government in Australia has declared they would not oppose his return. His old employers have said he would be welcome back although it is thought unlikely he will return there. This sideshow highlighted how dependent public hospitals are on imported third-world doctors and that, rather than be bemused at China's opportunism in offering medical training to so many aspiring doctors, we should be grateful for providing a source of cheap doctors to keep our public health system affordable.

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Human rights vanish in NHS

IF you need evidence that the NHS has badly lost its way, look no further than the treatment meted out to 58-year-old Colette Mills. The former nurse, from Stokesley, in North Yorkshire, has been diagnosed with breast cancer that has spread to the rest of her body. Her best chance of survival is to take the new "wonder drug", Avastin. But, because of waste and bureaucratic incompetence, the South Tees Hospitals NHS Trust says it can't afford to give her the life-saving drug. That fact alone helps explain why UK cancer survival rates lag so far behind our European neighbours - despite record amounts of taxpayers' cash being poured into the health service.

But it gets worse. Mrs Mills offered to pay the o4,000-a-month cost of Avastin out of her own savings. Fine, said the NHS, but if you do, you will be treated as a private patient and will be charged the full cost of all your treatment - about o15,000 a month, which Mrs Mills cannot afford.

So, Mrs Mills is trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare - the NHS won't give her the drug for free, but it won't let her pay for it either. That's what you get when you allow a centralised, Soviet-style bureaucracy to run healthcare - an inflexible, lumpen, one-size-fits-all, style of treatment, not driven by patient need or any notion of fairness, but motivated by the sort of rigid, outdated ideology that should have been buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall.

Patient choice, anyone? It is not as though allowing Mrs Mills to pay for the drugs would disadvantage anybody else. And the argument put forward by the Department of Health, that allowing patients to combine NHS care with private "top-ups" would create a "two-tier health service", is nonsense on stilts. There always has been a two-tier health service. I can't help thinking that a government minister's spouse would get Avastin in the blink of an eye if they were unlucky enough to be diagnosed with cancer.

And isn't it decidedly odd that when a normal taxpayer is discriminated against and bullied in this manner, there's not a peep from the usually vociferous human rights lobby. Don't ordinary people have human rights, too?

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