The NHS is looking at recruiting GPs from India in an attempt to tackle the serious shortage of family doctors.
Health Education England, the NHS’s training and recruitment agency, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Apollo Hospitals chain in India about lending clinical staff between them.
GP leaders said the initiative amounted to “an admission of failure” by ministers to develop enough homegrown staff and that it cast doubt on their pledge to increase the number of GPs by 5,000 by 2020.
It also led to warnings that bringing in doctors who had not been trained in the UK could pose a threat to patient safety.
HEE, which is currently recruiting GPs, provided few details about the link-up.
Dr Ramesh Mehta, the president of the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, told the doctors’ magazine Pulse, which revealed the move, that his contacts in India had told him HEE is keen to hire “as many GPs as possible”.
Full story in The Guardian 7 April 2016