INSIDE POLAND’S GP FACTORY
...where YOU pay to train doctors to speak English – so they can cash in on UK shortfall with £90,000 salaries
PAYING careful attention in a well-equipped classroom, these foreign medics are studying at a college in Poland which will help plug Britain’s GP shortfall.
The eventual reward for those on the three-month course – paid for by the British taxpayer – will be a generous £90,000-a-year salary as a family doctor in the UK.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has promised to train more British doctors, but the lack of GPs is now so desperate that NHS England has been forced to look abroad to bring in 500 more by 2020.
The first 25 overseas GPs will be going to work in Lincolnshire, which has a chronic shortage of family doctors. It is these doctors who will be starting their residential course this week at the campus of Paragona, the Warsaw-based recruitment firm that has a deal with the NHS.
They receive training, including English language lessons, for free, and once they have arrived here, they will receive what is described as a ‘very attractive salary’ which starts at £70,000 – and rises to £90,000 after two years.
That is well above the £53,600 average annual pay for a salaried GP in Britain – and far in excess of that offered in many Eastern European countries.
After three years they will also receive a £10,000 ‘golden handshake’ loyalty bonus.
Paragona’s UK recruitment consultant, Katarzyna Sulkowska, said in an advertisement that the classes were a ‘free of charge training programme… to prepare doctors for working at a [GP] practice in England’.
The initiative is a pilot project by NHS England and Lincolnshire doctors ‘to help international recruits navigate the registration and admission process to practice [sic] medicine in England’.
Paragona describes its dedicated campus in Piaseczno, a quiet town on the outskirts of Warsaw, as providing ‘super conditions for learning a new language fast and effectively’, and has previously readied medics to work in Scandinavia. Recruits are housed in smart apartments, and are then expected to work intensively to learn the language and culture of their ‘target country’, according to a promotional YouTube video.
‘After a few months, the doctors start to work in the country, where the language used to be unknown to them,’ it adds. But it isn’t all hard work: Paragona puts on ten-pin bowling, swimming and yoga to help the doctors relax.
The first UK-bound recruits, who are due to begin their 12-week course at the campus tomorrow, should start work in Lincolnshire in April, according to Dr Kieran Sharrock, medical director of the county’s local medical committee. He said recruitment had been ‘really successful’, with 13 GPs from Poland, Croatia, Greece, Spain and Lithuania accepted so far. More interviews are set to follow.
Dr Sharrock said the pay levels were based on that of a ‘local average salaried GP’.
The scheme will help Mr Hunt achieve his pledge to increase GP numbers by 5,000 by 2020. Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said: ‘It’s absolutely essential for the future of our NHS, and in order to ensure safe patient care, that we pull out all the stops and deliver this pledge as a matter of urgency.’
They will even get a £10,000 loyalty bonus