JML Stone highlights the “constant predatory (recruitment) activities of for-profit and non-profit US (healthcare) corporations in the UK” (Letters, May 9).
Such “skimming off the top” of the NHS “inevitably means that excellent nurses and specialists are being sucked from the health service, but without any perceivable benefit to the indigenous population — in fact, just the opposite”.
This may be fair comment, but are we talking about the same NHS that has for years “skimmed off the top” of other English-speaking countries to supply us with considerable numbers of doctors and nurses? No financial compensation is paid to the host country for the training received that we subsequently benefit from.
For every Filipino nurse that is enticed over here, a hole is left over there. The Covid pandemic has surely highlighted how this “beggar my neighbour attitude” to global healthcare is in no one’s interest.
If the UK won’t train enough doctors and nurses for our own needs, we should question the moral aspect of raiding another country’s healthcare system to make up for the fact.
Nicholas Malins-Smith
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK