Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Doctors quit dirty NHS for India

The influx of thousands of Indian doctors into the National Health Service is going into reverse. Hospitals in India are now said to be cleaner and better equipped than many in Britain and doctors are quitting the NHS to work there instead.

The director of one of India’s biggest private hospital chains said he was receiving five job applications a week from NHS doctors and that half his 3,000 consultants were from Britain.

Doctors say they are moving to India because of its economy, state of the art equipment, higher standards than the NHS and a better quality of life. In particular, they say hospitals in India, which many Britons still imagine to be impoverished and dirty, suffer less from hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA.

India has no equivalent of the NHS but there has been a boom in private hospitals that resemble luxury hotels, with marble foyers and corridors mopped by an army of liveried cleaners.

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