A MOVING CARE CRISIS

As lockdown eases, I think how fortunate we are to have been helped through this crisis by so many health workers who trained here and abroad. Around 13% of NHS staff are from overseas and we are lucky to have them, though it might be more accurate to say that it’s not so much luck as money. It is thanks to our better pay that we’ve attracted thousands of overseas health workers. Should we feel uneasy about this? While we’re benefiting, I can’t help wondering who is looking after the patients back in their home countries. Among the NHS staff there are 9,272 Polish nationals, according to the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics. Last year, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said: “Give us our people back”, and protested, “We have trained 20,000 medical doctors for foreign countries”. The chronic health crisis in Poland is all too familiar to Jaroslaw Bilinski, a doctor at the Medical University of Warsaw and the city’s Deputy Chairman of the District Council of Medical Doctors. “Annual emigration rate is about 10% of all medical graduates,” he said. “This has caused colossal problems for our health care system, medical staff and patients. There are waiting lists of a couple of years to see a specialist or to be operated on.” Two factors keep the Polish health service from being even worse. The first is that many staff work beyond retirement age, making up around 30% of the total. The second is that low pay forces many to take multiple jobs within hospitals. “Tiredness is a huge problem,” explained Dr Bilinski. “But if it were not for the fact that many doctors and nurses have two jobs the waiting lists would be longer.” The pandemic has magnified all these problems, yet he doesn’t resent colleagues who have left Poland, aiming his criticism instead at the government for failing to value them. “This is a free market and everybody can decide for themselves what to do,” he said. Besides the UK, they mainly head for Germany, Sweden and Norway, part of a one-way street of emigration of key workers from poor countries to richer ones. So on Thursday nights when I thank our NHS staff of all nationalities, I’m also reminded of the countries that are losers in this free movement of labour – and they are suffering dreadfully.

TOUGH TIME Jaroslaw Bilinski