Doctors must repay cost of training before deserting NHS to work abroad

WE should be grateful to Helen McArdle for her sensible comments about the problems of staffing

NHS posts (“NHS workforce planning must include data on doctors going abroad”, The Herald, November 10).

It has been common knowledge for some years that doctors educated in Scotland have chosen to emigrate to Australia and elsewhere, where the savings made from not bearing the cost of their training, which we have borne, enables the payment of much higher salary levels than apply here. It is time that graduates are obliged to serve, say, seven years in this country, or otherwise be obliged to refund the cost.

There is a history, too, of difficulties in filling other NHS posts. Strangely, there are people available in agencies for employment at extortionate cost, and that was a feature also when we had the previous Labour-led coalition at Holyrood. Maybe they prefer to determine their hours of work.

For decades we have relied upon people from abroad to staff the

NHS, especially nurses. Although nurses are not all female, it is possible they have been influenced by the insistence that women can do better, and break through the glass ceiling, so they have been enticed into jobs where their prospects are considered to be better.

Brexit has meant those from the EU are leaving, or are no longer being recruited in sufficient numbers, to fill the vacancies.

So, it is scandalous that opposition politicians at Holyrood positively salivate in laying the blame on First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP government when they themselves are aware of the problems.

And they provide no solutions themselves – but they had better get thinking, because the problems are unlikely to be solved before the next Holyrood election.

How can the SNP steal opposition policies if they don’t have any?

Douglas R Mayer, 76 Thomson Crescent, Currie,

Midlothian.

Reader John Dyer, who took this image, writes: “This is Garry Beach at Tolsta on the Isle of Lewis. Looks like the Rings.” He captured the image on a Lum1x TZ 70.

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