First Brexit, then the health exit as GPs leave

William Booth

and

Karla Adam

From his wind-scoured bungalow, Andreas Herfurt overlooks the village cemetery, an end place in his line of work. For almost 20 years, the German has served as the town doctor at Bettyhill in the woolly wilds on the north coast of Scotland.

“Those are not just my former patients,” Herfurt said of the graves surrounding the old church. “They are my neighbours and my friends. I have learned the hard way the whole truth about cradle-to-grave medical care.”

Herfurt is the National Health Service’s family physician for 850 souls in a 1035 sq km rural practice.

Herfurt, 53, who never became a British citizen, says he has loved his life in the NHS. And he digs living in the middle of nowhere, with his Scottish wife and their big, slobbery dog.

“But I don’t know how much longer we will stay,” he said. “In the simplest, most emotional terms, because I am human, I wonder: Am I wanted?”

Like Herfurt, many of his European colleagues in the NHS say they were stunned by Brexit, the vote by Britain in a June 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. The exit, which was not backed by most voters in Scotland or Northern Ireland, is scheduled for March 2019.

In a survey at the end of last year, the British Medical Association discovered that almost half of the European doctors working in Britain were considering leaving, and that nearly one in five were taking concrete steps — selling homes, looking for jobs.

If Brexit was driven by strong emotions, so is the reaction to it by some European doctors and nurses in the NHS. They are taking Brexit personally, expressing indignation at the prospect of having to be vetted in postBrexit Britain. They noted that when they came to work here, they were Europeans coming to a member state of the European Union. They didn’t see themselves as “immigrants.” They were Europeans exercising their right to free movement in Europe.

This month, Parliament published new statistics on NHS staff from overseas, revealing that in Britain, about 139,000 — or 12.5 per cent of NHS staff — are from Europe and elsewhere

Harry Quilter-Pinner, a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London, said, “The influx of workers from the EU are vital to keeping the show on the road. If the Government said, ‘ Okay, let’s train up new doctors,’ you wouldn’t get any payoff for 10 years. The only way to fill that gap is through immigration.”

The problem, said Siva Anandaciva, chief analyst for the King’s Fund, an independent healthcare think-tank, is “the worrying trends emerging that show these staff no longer want to work in the UK.”

He pointed to sharp declines in the numbers of European nurses and midwives coming to Britain at a time when the country needs to hire tens of thousands of nurses.

Herfurt has continued his usual house calls, his visits to elder-care residences.

Annie Hall, one of his patients, shook her head and said, “No, no, no!” when asked what she thought about Herfurt leaving.

“He can’t go,” she said. “He’s a local, almost.”