<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER  No. 2101 -- 4/15/2010 >>>>>

The Wall Street Journal has joined a chorus of news reports that claim that
there is a looming shortage of doctors. Of course we have heard similar
shortage shouting about doctors for decades, but this time the hysteria is
centered on the fact that Obamacare will give millions of additional people
access to health care -- and that will create problems for a system that
won't be able to cope with the need for large numbers of new primary care
physicians.

Where there is shortage shouting there is usually someone calling for more
H-1B visas, or some other type of scheme to allow more foreign workers into
the U.S. The following paragraph from the WSJ activated my alarm bells
[article posted below]:

   While doctors trained in other countries could theoretically help
   the primary-care shortage, they hit the same bottleneck with
   resident slots, because they must still complete a U.S. residency
   in order to get a license to practice medicine independently in
   the U.S. In the 2010 class of residents, some 13% of slots are
   filled by non-U.S. citizens who completed medical school outside
   the U.S.

There you have it folks! If the U.S. could find a way of stealing more
doctors from foreign countries we could supply all the doctors we need to
solve the impending medical care crisis that Obamacare is going to create.
Ooops! Wasn't Obamacare supposed to solve the crisis???

There is one problem that the cheap labor lobby and the open border
globalists will have to solve before they let more foreign doctors into the
U.S. It's not as simple as increasing the number of visas, because as I
have explained before the number of visas that can be issued to foreign
doctors is almost unlimited. To learn more about doctor visas please read
my recently published article:

http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_20_2/tsc_20_2_sanchez.s
html
The Most Generous Nation in the World... at Giving Jobs Away, by Rob
Sanchez

Whenever you hear that we need to expand immigration or create a new visa
to import in more doctors, just remember that what you heard is pure bunk!

So, the availability of visas is no obstacle to bringing in more foreign
doctors because an unlimited number of doctors could immigrate to the U.S.
to practice medicine if they could get certified to do so. In order to get
certified all medical graduates (whether citizen or foreign national) have
to serve out a period of from 3 to 7 years of indentured servitude which is
commonly called "residency" (medical students claim it's slavery but that's
because they don't understand what indenture means). Increasing the number
of doctors requires more residency positions -- and that decision is
controlled by the American Medical Association (AMA).

This is how the system works, according to the AMA:

http://www.ama-assn.org/aps/physcred.html#foreign

   The Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG)
   serves the public interest by offering a program of evaluation,
   examination, and certification for physicians who were educated
   outside the United States and Canada. Physicians educated outside
   the United States and Canada, termed international medical
   graduates (IMGs), may be citizens of the United States or Canada
   who chose to be educated elsewhere or non-citizens who were
   admitted to the United States by US immigration authorities.

While the AMA argues that their strict certification standards increase the
quality of physicians, protagonists claim that the AMA deliberately limits
the number in order to create artificial shortages of doctors, which in
turn causes the wages of doctors to increase because of market pressures.

Assuming that the AMA is going to retain their control of the market when
Obamacare is in place, there doesn't seem to be a way for greedy hospitals
to import more foreign doctors, but wait .... how about a scenario where
the rug is pulled out from underneath the AMA by passing laws that allow
residencies in foreign countries? In this scenario a doctor could transfer
their residencies in the same way college students change schools.

Uber-libertarian Dean Baker has thought this thing through. He suggests
that the government usurp the AMA to increase the number of doctors. Side
benefits will include a dramatic decline in the salaries of doctors as the
foreigners flood into the U.S. and compete for jobs. Ahhhhhh! It's the old
supply and demand curve, which is usually denied by economists,
libertarians, neo-cons, and neo-liberals when they advocate expanding the
labor force by using immigration. [article posted below]

   What if, however, the government sought to remove the licensing
   barriers for foreign physicians? Compensation in the most highly
   paid medical specialties averages far above $250,000 a year
   (even after paying malpractice fees). Many doctors trained
   outside the United States would find these positions attractive
   even if they only paid $100,000 a year. Opening medical practice
   to foreign competition would allow for the same sorts of gains
   from trade that we have seen with opening trade in apparel and
   textiles - except that we spend far more on doctors each year
   than we do on clothes.

You gotta like the way he compares doctors to textile workers! Personally I
think it would do doctors some good if their egos were cut down! If that
doesn't bust the behinds of overpaid American doctors Baker has other plans
to shrink the AMA's influence, like for example increasing "medical
tourism".

   There are clear ways to take advantage of lower costs in other
   countries, making our own system more affordable without
   diminishing the quality. We could allow more foreign-born
   doctors to work in the United States, for instance. We could
   encourage the "medical tourism" that allows Americans to have
   major procedures performed in other countries, and we could
   permit Medicare beneficiaries to buy into the lower-cost
   healthcare systems of other wealthy countries.

Baker's strategy for forcing down the salaries of doctors seems to make
sense, in the short term. Unfortunately the laws of supply and demand will
dictate that American students won't choose medical careers as doctors,
which will reduce the supply of domestic doctors. Of course third-world
countries could probably send us as many replacements as we need so if
price and availability is the main issue, Baker's solution makes sense.

Don't think for a second that the medical robber barons in the U.S. were
the first to think about the idea of global physicians. Europe is way ahead
of us.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8608010.stm

   ...patients risked being treated by doctors who were incompetent or
   were not fluent in English. [snipped]
   European regulations which allow free movement of labour mean the
   GMC is unable to carry out clinical or language checks on doctors
   from EU countries as it does for those from elsewhere in the world.
   "System of vetting foreign medics 'needs improving", BBC


Canada is experiencing the controversy in a big way. Their "problem" will
be solved by calling it an issue of basic human rights. If Canada is an
example of our future, expect the AMA to be characterized as racists,
protectionists, and xenophobes.

Watch this video for what's going on in Canada:

http://www.nfb.ca/film/doctors_without_residency/
Doctors Without Residency

   This short documentary highlights how discrimination prevents
   foreign-trained doctors from practicing in Canada -- even
   after they've received their Canadian qualifications.
   Interviews with medical professionals and human rights
   advocates illustrate how systemic racism plays a role.

So, what does the future hold? Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Congressman
Joseph Crowley (D-NY) sponsored a bill that would increase Medicare
residency slots by 15%. That's not going to help much if there is really a
shortage. I predict there will be big pressure for a bill that will allow
foreign doctors to transfer their residency, or there will be legislative
proposals to allow some type of limited global residency like the EU. It
will be interesting to see how long the AMA will be able to resist the
onslaught of foreign doctors. Remember PATCO?

web version of newsletter:
http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2010/04/15/obamacare-blamed-for-impending-sho
rtage-of-doctors
or go directly to Vdare's blog:
http://blog.vdare.com


NOTE: The rest of Vdare is closed down because of funding problems, but
that's a whole different story.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304506904575180331528424238.ht
ml?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond
Medical Schools Can't Keep Up


http://www.counterpunch.org/baker08042009.html
Why Don't We Globalize Health Care?


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8608010.stm
Tough checks on foreign GPs urged


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304506904575180331528424238.ht
ml?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

    * APRIL 12, 2010

Medical Schools Can't Keep Up
As Ranks of Insured Expand, Nation Faces Shortage of 150,000 Doctors in 15
Years


By SUZANNE SATALINE And SHIRLEY S. WANG
[RESIDENCY] Getty Images

First-year resident Dr. Rachel Seay, third from left, circumcises a newborn
in George Washington University Hospital's delivery wing on March 12.

The new federal health-care law has raised the stakes for hospitals and
schools already scrambling to train more doctors.

Experts warn there won't be enough doctors to treat the millions of people
newly insured under the law. At current graduation and training rates, the
nation could face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15
years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

That shortfall is predicted despite a push by teaching hospitals and
medical schools to boost the number of U.S. doctors, which now totals about
954,000.

The greatest demand will be for primary-care physicians. These general
practitioners, internists, family physicians and pediatricians will have a
larger role under the new law, coordinating care for each patient.

The U.S. has 352,908 primary-care doctors now, and the college association
estimates that 45,000 more will be needed by 2020. But the number of
medical-school students entering family medicine fell more than a quarter
between 2002 and 2007.
Related Video

    * Medical Training in Second Life (04/12/10)
    * Getting Doctors, Hospitals to Use Electronic Medical Records
(01/26/09)
    * Faces of Health Care: A Doctor is in the House (12/22/09)

A shortage of primary-care and other physicians could mean more-limited
access to health care and longer wait times for patients.

Proponents of the new health-care law say it does attempt to address the
physician shortage. The law offers sweeteners to encourage more people to
enter medical professions, and a 10% Medicare pay boost for primary-care
doctors.

Meanwhile, a number of new medical schools have opened around the country
recently. As of last October, four new medical schools enrolled a total of
about 190 students, and 12 medical schools raised the enrollment of
first-year students by a total of 150 slots, according to the AAMC. Some
18,000 students entered U.S. medical schools in the fall of 2009, the AAMC
says.

But medical colleges and hospitals warn that these efforts will hit a big
bottleneck: There is a shortage of medical resident positions. The
residency is the minimum three-year period when medical-school graduates
train in hospitals and clinics.

There are about 110,000 resident positions in the U.S., according to the
AAMC. Teaching hospitals rely heavily on Medicare funding to pay for these
slots. In 1997, Congress imposed a cap on funding for medical residencies,
which hospitals say has increasingly hurt their ability to expand the
number of positions.

Medicare pays $9.1 billion a year to teaching hospitals, which goes toward
resident salaries and direct teaching costs, as well as the higher
operating costs associated with teaching hospitals, which tend to see the
sickest and most costly patients.

Doctors' groups and medical schools had hoped that the new health-care law,
passed in March, would increase the number of funded residency slots, but
such a provision didn't make it into the final bill.

"It will probably take 10 years to even make a dent into the number of
doctors that we need out there," said Atul Grover, the AAMC's chief
advocacy officer.

While doctors trained in other countries could theoretically help the
primary-care shortage, they hit the same bottleneck with resident slots,
because they must still complete a U.S. residency in order to get a license
to practice medicine independently in the U.S. In the 2010 class of
residents, some 13% of slots are filled by non-U.S. citizens who completed
medical school outside the U.S.

One provision in the law attempts to address residencies. Since some
residency slots go unfilled each year, the law will pool the funding for
unused slots and redistribute it to other institutions, with the majority
of these slots going to primary-care or general-surgery residencies. The
slot redistribution, in effect, will create additional residencies, because
previously unfilled positions will now be used, according to the Centers
for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
From the Archive

Some efforts by educators are focused on boosting the number of
primary-care doctors. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
anticipates the state will need 350 more primary-care doctors in the next
five years. So it raised its class size by 24 students last year, beyond
the 150 previous annual admissions.

In addition, the university opened a satellite medical campus in
Fayetteville to give six third-year students additional clinical-training
opportunities, said Richard Wheeler, executive associate dean for academic
affairs. The school asks students to commit to entering rural medicine, and
the school has 73 people in the program.
Journal Community

    * discuss

    “ As a specialist physician I will suggest that until primary care
physicians can earn 70-80% of what most specialists make without killing
themselves, there will be no incentive for the best and the brightest to go
into primary care. ”

—Michael Brennan

"We've tried to make sure the attitude of students going into primary care
has changed," said Dr. Wheeler. "To make sure primary care is a respected
specialty to go into."

Montefiore Medical Center, the university hospital for Albert Einstein
College of Medicine in New York, has 1,220 residency slots. Since the
1970s, Montefiore has encouraged residents to work a few days a week in
community clinics in New York's Bronx borough, where about 64 Montefiore
residents a year care for pregnant women, deliver children and provide
vaccines. There has been a slight increase in the number of residents who
ask to join the program, said Peter Selwyn, chairman of Montefiore's
department of family and social medicine.

One is Justin Sanders, a 2007 graduate of the University of Vermont College
of Medicine who is a second-year resident at Montefiore. In recent weeks,
he has been caring for children he helped deliver. He said more doctors are
needed in his area, but acknowledged that "primary-care residencies are not
in the sexier end. A lot of these [specialty] fields are a lot sexier to
students with high debt burdens."
[RESIDENCY]

Write to Suzanne Sataline at suzanne.sataline@wsj.com and Shirley S. Wang
at shirley.wang@wsj.com


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.counterpunch.org/baker08042009.html

The Doctor is In ... Bangkok
Why Don't We Globalize Health Care?

By DEAN BAKER

With the rising cost of healthcare now atop the national agenda, one theme
rings like a frustrating refrain: healthcare is special, so the tools we
use to fix normal economic problems don’t apply. What good is mass
production in confronting the complexities of the body? How can
cost-benefit analysis grasp the unfixable value of a human life?

There is at least one tenet of modern economic policy, however, that we are
excluding from the healthcare debate at our peril: globalization.

It may seem bizarre to suggest that globalization could somehow improve
healthcare. After all, the practice of medicine is not only deeply
individual, but tightly tied to time and place. Apart from possibly buying
drugs from Canada, most people have probably never given any thought to the
idea that globalization could have a meaningful impact on healthcare in the
United States. But globalization, carefully applied, could reduce costs in
the short term and create pressure for the bigger changes our system
desperately needs.

There are clear ways to take advantage of lower costs in other countries,
making our own system more affordable without diminishing the quality. We
could allow more foreign-born doctors to work in the United States, for
instance. We could encourage the "medical tourism" that allows Americans to
have major procedures performed in other countries, and we could permit
Medicare beneficiaries to buy into the lower-cost healthcare systems of
other wealthy countries.

Each of these offers enormous opportunities for savings in the healthcare
sector and benefits for the economy. They don’t need to be exploitive -
we can structure any new arrangements to ensure that our trading partners
benefit as well. This is especially important in the case of developing
countries: we cannot let healthcare savings for the United States come at
the expense of reduced access to care for people in the developing world.

It will not be easy to globalize healthcare. The interest groups that
oppose government cost-containment measures will be just as vigorous in
their objections to increased international competition, if the result is
to reduce their income. There are also real problems in ensuring quality
control. But if we get it right, a globalized healthcare system would not
only lower costs, but could even bring health benefits. Canada, Germany,
France, and the United Kingdom all pay roughly half as much per person for
their healthcare as the United States, yet all these countries enjoy longer
life expectancies than ours. This implies that there are enormous potential
gains to the US economy, and to American patients, in opening up this
sector to the world.

The economic idea driving globalization is simple: that the United States -
and the world - gain when goods and services are produced in the country
that can provide the best quality at the lowest price. Just as we benefit
from allowing goods and services to flow freely over the border between
Pennsylvania and New York, we also benefit from allowing them to flow
across international borders.

The reality of globalization is often less beneficent than the textbook
picture. It has reduced wages for a large segment of the US workforce; it
has often meant dreadful working conditions and environmental degradation
in the developing world. Nonetheless, there are real gains: we pay far less
for our clothes, our cars, our computer service calls than if the United
States was a closed economy. Costs go down, and our standard of living, on
balance, goes up.

Globalization has been conspicuously missing in healthcare policy debates,
however. Even the economists who normally push a free-trade agenda have
been silent, largely because there has been a tendency to conceive of
healthcare narrowly as a domestic issue. There is some logic to this narrow
view: in a healthcare emergency, we need immediate treatment, not
assistance from someone halfway around the world. Nonetheless, there are
some obvious and important ways in which the healthcare sector can benefit
from increased globalization.

The first route is through opening the door wider to medical professionals
from other countries. Doctors in the United States, especially highly
trained specialists, earn far more than their counterparts in Western
Europe or Canada, at least in part because it is very difficult for doctors
- even those who meet our high standards - to train in other countries and
then work in the United States. There has been little effort to coordinate
medical licensing standards so that well-trained doctors elsewhere can
practice here. In economic terms, this is a form of protectionism, just as
arbitrary as restrictions on imported shoes or clothes. Trade policy over
the last three decades has worked to dismantle the barriers to imported
goods, but largely ignored the barriers that obstruct the entry of
qualified doctors.

What if, however, the government sought to remove the licensing barriers
for foreign physicians? Compensation in the most highly paid medical
specialties averages far above $250,000 a year (even after paying
malpractice fees). Many doctors trained outside the United States would
find these positions attractive even if they only paid $100,000 a year.
Opening medical practice to foreign competition would allow for the same
sorts of gains from trade that we have seen with opening trade in apparel
and textiles - except that we spend far more on doctors each year than we
do on clothes.

To allow hospitals to hire well-trained doctors from Mexico, India, and
other developing countries, the government would need to eliminate certain
protectionist barriers, such as the requirement that an employer first try
to hire a US citizen or green card holder at the current market rate. The
next step would be drafting international training and licensing standards;
doctors could be tested in their home countries, by US-certified testers.
Those who do would have the same access to a healthcare job in the United
States as a US citizen. A kid growing up in Mexico City or Beijing would
have as much opportunity to work as a neurosurgeon in the United States as
a kid growing up in Long Island.

To compensate for the inevitable brain drain from developing countries, we
could impose a modest tax on the gross income of foreign-trained doctors in
the United States for their home countries to spend on training doctors who
stay. A 10 percent tax on one US-based doctor’s salary would almost
certainly support the training of two doctors in most developing countries,
and ensure that countries sending doctors to the US would also see an
improvement in the quality of care at home.

The next important way to gain from globalization is to move some
procedures overseas. Today this practice goes by the slightly pejorative
term “medical tourism,” but behind that nickname is an important and
growing trend that can offer real benefits.

Facilities in developing countries such as Thailand and India can perform
many major medical procedures for a fraction of the cost in the United
States. These facilities are set up to meet Western standards of care; in
many cases they are equipped with the most modern medical equipment. For
some medical procedures, the savings over an American procedure can easily
cover the cost of airfare and hotel bills for the patient and several
family members. Today, between 60,000 and 85,000 people cross international
borders each year for medical procedures, according to consulting firm
McKinsey & Co., and the number is growing. But its growth, and the
potential gains, are limited by the lack of adequate government oversight.

If US policymakers embraced rather than ignored medical tourism, the
government could create a process for certifying facilities in other
countries to ensure the quality of care. It could also establish guidelines
for malpractice liability; insurance companies could contract with
facilities in the developing world and offer large discounts to patients
who opt to travel for major procedures. (Some insurance companies have
already begun offering such options.) To ensure that the host countries
also benefit, the US government can insist that developing countries impose
taxes on medical tourism, and use the proceeds to improve their own
healthcare systems.

The third way that globalization can help healthcare is by allowing
Medicare beneficiaries to buy into national health systems overseas.
Currently, tens of millions of current or future Medicare beneficiaries
have close family or emotional ties to countries with more efficient
healthcare systems, and in many cases may want to retire to these
countries. However, at present their Medicare benefits are of no use
outside of the United States. Medicare beneficiaries moving to a foreign
country are left to make healthcare arrangements for themselves, or return
to America for any expensive procedure.

What if Medicare benefits could cross borders instead? With portable
healthcare, Americans might feel more liberated to retire abroad, enjoying
comfortable lives in lower-cost countries and generating enormous savings
for the US government. The cost of healthcare abroad is so much lower that
the U.S. government could even offer a premium to participating countries -
say, 10 percent above that nation’s per-person healthcare costs. Medicare
beneficiaries and the US government could split the remaining savings,
which would still be substantial. For example, a beneficiary moving to the
Netherlands or the United Kingdom in 2010 could expect to pocket close to
$2,000 a year just from their share of the savings, a nice supplement to
retirement benefits. That amount will only grow over time.

Having a large segment of our retired population living overseas may not be
desirable in the long term, but it is almost certainly better than letting
their runaway healthcare costs wreck our economy.

There will be many objections to increased globalization of healthcare.
Some people may object to being treated by immigrant doctors, no matter how
highly qualified they may be. And the thought of people flying around the
world for major surgery is somewhat offensive on its face - if you need
healthcare, you’d like to think that you could get it near where you
live. The AMA and the other interest groups will object just as strongly to
potential income losses due to globalization as they do to potential income
losses due to President Obama’s healthcare plan.

To counter this opposition, we need stronger voices among the experts. It
would be helpful if my fellow economists would act like economists on this
issue and start singing the praises of globalization. If economists
denounced the doctors and others demanding special protections in the same
way they denounced autoworkers seeking such protections, it would go a long
way toward moving the debate forward.

The goal of globalizing healthcare, of course, is not to send Americans
around the world in search of healthcare. Our real goal should be to fix
the US system to provide quality at a reasonable price. Globalization is
best seen as a stopgap measure: a way to save money by taking advantage of
more efficient foreign healthcare systems, while providing incentives for
retooling our own.

If it works, it could increase the pressure for reform by making the
inefficiencies of the US system more apparent. It could also put
much-needed downward pressure on prices in the United States. If the gap
between the cost of major medical procedures performed in America and other
countries continues to grow, fewer people might have those procedures
performed here. Highly paid medical specialists will either accept lower
fees or go with much less work. The same logic will apply to other
high-cost areas of the system.

Globalization offers enormous opportunities: it allows Americans to escape
a broken healthcare system and generates new pressures to fix it. If done
right, our trading partners will benefit as well. This may be a circuitous
route to a system that provides high quality care for everyone, but it may
also be the only route.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall
of the Bubble Economy.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8608010.stm

Tough checks on foreign GPs urged
By Nick Triggle
Health reporter, BBC News

Urgent changes must be made to the system of vetting foreign doctors
offering out-of-hours GP care, MPs say.

The Health Committee warned NHS trusts "were not doing their jobs" by
failing to check language and medical skills.

That meant patients risked being treated by doctors who were incompetent or
were not fluent in English.

Lives were at risk due to a reliance on overseas doctors in weekend and
night GP shifts, the MPs said. The government said improvements were being
made.

Poor English

The MPs said ministers should push for changes to EU rules to allow checks
by the General Medical Council.

European regulations which allow free movement of labour mean the GMC is
unable to carry out clinical or language checks on doctors from EU
countries as it does for those from elsewhere in the world.

As employers, NHS trusts can carry out their own tests, but the MPs said
this was not always happening.

There are no exact figures for how many foreign doctors are employed for
out-of-hours work, although ministers said in evidence to the committee
that it was a "limited" problem.
GP OUT-OF-HOUR CARE
# GPs were allowed to opt out of providing weekend and night cover in 2004.
Nine in 10 did so
# Responsibility for the service then passed to NHS managers working for
primary care trusts
# They have mainly contracted out the service to firms or not-for-profit
groups of doctors
# These tend to employ locums, some overseas medics, to cover shifts

The MPs looked into the issue after a coroner criticised the system in
February following the death of a patient, David Gray, in Cambridgeshire
two years ago.

He was killed by German doctor Daniel Ubani who administered 10 times the
normal dose of diamorphine on his first NHS shift.

Dr Ubani's poor English meant he was refused work by the NHS in Leeds, but
he was later accepted in Cornwall, which then led to work in
Cambridgeshire.

Committee chairman Kevin Barron said: "Everything must be done as soon as
possible to ensure another life is not lost in this way."

The committee's report said the government should lobby Europe about
changing the law - it is due to be reviewed in 2012 and ministers have
already promised to bring up the issue in the coming years.

But the report also raised questions about the UK's interpretation of the
rules - the GMC believes regulators in other parts of Europe are still
carrying out language checks.

The MPs said the issue was particularly pressing as GPs in the UK tended to
have much more responsibility than their European counterparts.

Dr Stuart Gray, the son of Mr Gray and a GP himself, said the changes
proposed must be made "urgently".

'Urgent review'

Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, co-wrote a
separate review of out-of-hours service for the government.

He told BBC Radio 5 Live that European rules prevented the GMC from
assessing the language skills of GP coming from Europe, although that could
be done at a local level within the UK.

Professor Field said: "Ministers have accepted all of our recommendations,
and gone further, but there needs to be an urgent review of the European
legislation to make sure doctors are assessed at a national level as well
as locally."

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said checks should be
allowed.

He added: "Labour has known for some time that the current safeguards in
place are not working but has completely failed to take action."

And Conservative shadow health minister Mark Simmonds said the report had
highlighted "significant failures".

But the Department of Health said it was already making changes to improve
the regime.

A spokesman said it had recently reminded NHS trusts of their obligation to
assess doctors they were putting on their employment lists.

And he added the organisations in charge of providing out-of-hours care -
mainly firms and not-for-profit groups of doctors, both of which use
overseas medics to do shifts - would be facing tougher regulation in the
future.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Newsletter Homepage:
http://www.JobDestruction.com/shameh1b/JobDestructionNews.htm

Support this Newsletter and www.JobDestruction.com by donating:
www.zazona.com/Donations.htm

To Be removed from this mailing list, reply to this
email with UNSUbSCRIBE in the subject window
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -