In a message setting a "very clear moral and ethical priority for the new Government as it chairs the G8 summit", the leader of the UK’s doctors, BMA Chairman James Johnson yesterday (Monday 27 June) criticised developed countries for draining skilled health professionals from some of the world’s poorest countries. The "rape of the poorest countries must stop" he said.
Speaking to an audience of 450 doctors at the BMA’s annual representative meeting in Manchester, Mr Johnson condemned "the obscene exploitation perpetrated by the English speaking nations of the North on some of the world’s poorest countries. "In the UK we have around 120,000 doctors practising medicine. The USA employs over 50% of all English-speaking doctors in the world. In Australia, a country of 20 million people, they have 48,000 doctors. In Ghana, which also has a population of 20 million, they have only 1500 doctors in the entire country. In Mozambique, with the same number of people, it is even worse. They have just 500" he said.
"This is not live aid, it’s reverse aid" said Mr Johnson.
He stressed he was not talking of closing doors to overseas colleagues because international exchange and collaboration must continue. But he warned "It is completely pointless for the UK to give USD 300 million in aid to Africa if we then systematically rob them of their most precious resource – intellectual capital and the practical ability to prevent and treat disease."
On domestic health issues, James Johnson urged doctors to make their voices heard in health reform. He said that the BMA had worked hard to reassert the voice of the clinician in health policy. Mr Johnson chose treatment centres as a key example of reforms that could work well if properly planned but would work against patients’ interests unless independent and NHS providers compete on a level playing field and provision was properly integrated.
"Treatment Centres are here and probably here to stay given the cross party consensus on diversity of provision. We should take pride in the fact that NHS, not the treatment centres, will continue to pick up the most complex and difficult cases. It is what we do best. But if we are going to have a multi-provider NHS then competition must be fair and the playing field levelled out - no more sweetheart deals that disadvantage NHS hospitals and leave patients, primary care trusts and GPs with no choice but to refer their patients to the treatment centre."
He warned government that NHS reforms would not work unless health professionals were involved.
"My message to the government is simple and clear. Let the professionals help you modernise the NHS to which we are passionately committed. Work with us and your reforms will have a much greater degree of acceptance – and they might just work. Without us they cannot work" he said.
Choose and Book (the government’s planned electronic booking system for hospital appointments) was an area which had to have professional input. Mr Johnson said: "It has been a fiasco so far, because people who do not work with doctors or patients have devised a system which does not begin to understand the basis on which GPs refer and hospitals organise clinics. This is just a mini example of the much bigger mess that could be coming our way with Connecting for Health, if the new systems are not planned with the involvement of the nurses and doctors who deliver the services to patients."