The Telegraph reports Lib Dem shadow health secretary Norman Lamb’s proposals to tighten rules on the employment of foreign doctors after the death of a 70-year-old man treated by a doctor from Germany:
Norman Lamb, the party’s health spokesman, [has] called for a series of reforms including a national language and competency test for every doctor wishing to work in Britain.
The demand comes after David Gray, from Manea, Cambridgeshire, died after he was given more than 10 times the recommended daily dose of diamorphine by Daniel Ubani, a locum doctor from Germany.
Dr Ubani, 67, had been on his first shift working for an out-of-hours medical service when the overdose was administered on February 16, 2008, an inquest into Mr Gray’s death has heard.
Norman’s proposals include:
· A national language and competence test for every doctor wishing to work in the UK
· Making sure that a suspension in one country is effective everywhere across the European Economic Area (EEA)
· Creating a criminal offence for a PCT to allow a doctor to operate without ensuring compliance with regulations
And here’s what he said about them:
The tragic death of David Gray raises serious concerns about the safety of out-of-hours care in this country. We cannot allow a situation to continue where we are reliant on tired, overworked foreign doctors to cover out-of-hours care.
“Patients’ lives are being put at risk because standards across Europe are not uniformly good and foreign doctors can practice in the NHS without a test of competence and language.
“Ministers have known for some time that the safeguards in place were not adequate but they have completely failed to take action.
“These proposals will ensure that every doctor working in this country can speak English, is familiar with our health service and is well trained.”
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7 Comments
What an utterly pathetic attempt to jump on a “wogs begin at Calais” bandwagon! We’ve got plenty of political parties that make a speciality of this sort of thing – the Liberal Democrats are supposed to be the ones that don’t.
British trained doctors, I suppose, never make mistakes.
Chris gets it entirely wrong. He should talk to the sons of David Gray who lost his life. I strongly support freedom of movement of labour – but it surely must be right that we demand a test of competence and language skills. If you are elderly and need a doctor in the middle of the night and the doctor cannot communicate with you surely we cannot justify that. A brilliant doctor from the Indian sub-continent needs to prove competence and language skills to be registered by the GMC. A doctor from another European country does not – even though we know that many other European regulators are of questionable standard. In some countries the regulator and trade union remains as the same body. There is a conflict of interest there. The UK has recognised that.
Surely we should be clear that we support freedom of movement but demand commensurate safeguards for patient safety. Surely that also means that when a doctor is suspended in one country that suspension should apply everywhere across the EU. Surely there should be an obligation to notify other regulators when a doctor is suspended. None of this applies at present.
Norman – how do these rules compare with other professions. Eg do EU plumbers have to prove some equivalent to Corgi (or whatever the new thing is called) qualifications to work on gas?
Norman Lamb gets it entirely wrong. His arguments only make any sense if you accept an anti-European agenda. The doctor concerned was not up to the job. He did not have the necessary experience. A look at his CV would have told anyone that. If the German authorities are accrediting doctors who should be working, then that should be raised with them and there are plenty of discussions about the equivalency of qualifications across the Union. We must fight very hard against any attempts to put up walls to freedom of movement. In Britain with its e-borders, we’re already losing the fight.
I’ve had a child saved from very serious ilness, or possibly worse, by a German doctor in A&E who took the trouble to work out what the problem is when everybody else had just flapped about being important. I’ve met plenty of UK doctors who weren’t up to it. Perhaps Norman Lamb thinks my village should have separate tests for doctors.
And that crack about “he should talk to the sons” is just offensive. Norman Lamb can try talking to the son of my father, who died of persistent infection after being taken from the operating theatre to a disgusting filthy NHS ward. After weeks of watching pus come out of his chest the surgeon called us on to say “we just can’t understand why the infection’s so bad.” We could. A few German medical staff might have been a very good idea.
Well that’s put Dr Nick Riviera on the dole, then.
One of the things I most dislike about the Liberal Democrats is that there is so much that cannot be talked about in a rational way because the kneejerk accusations of “racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia” etc will close down not only any discussion that isn’t strictly in line with liberal orthodoxy, but also discussion which is but which is vulnerable to a school boy “nah-nah-nah-nah-nah – you’ve said a naughty word” sort of attack which actually misses what was really said.
To Chris – is it really the case that poor understanding of the English language can never in any circumstances possibly be a problem with a doctor working in the UK, so that anyone who talks about it must be a racist or pandering to racism? Does the same apply to social and administrative knowledge about how the health system works here? Are these so obviously non-issues that if an attempt is made to raise them it is justified to shout the person who made it down with “nah-nah-nah-nah-nah, you’re a racist, and I’m a superior liberal type, I’ve won the game”?
Could it never ever in any circumstances be the case that a doctor who has been suspended for bad practice in one country might skip to another and hope in doing so the records of that bad practice would get mislaid? Could that be such an unlikely and impossible thing that anyone who says maybe we should be a bit more careful to check it isn’t happening deserves to be accused of an “utterly pathetic attempt to jump on a ‘wogs begin at Calais’ bandwagon”?
Is allowing a doctor to operate without ensuring s/he complies to the regulations we have laid down such a minor thing, in fact rather a noble thing since it shows what superior liberal types we are that we throw away whatever standards we have laid down in order to demonstrate we are not racists when it happens the doctor concerned has just arrived in these shores, that we should not make it any sort of offence to do it? In fact why not just throw out any regulations we have, since it is surely racist for us in Britain to have such regulations, or any regulations.
Regulations which apply only to Britain are surely thereby racist. Our government gathers in money from British people – well, how racist of it to discriminate against British people by collecting it from them alone – and then spends it on services in Britain. How appallingly racist that is – just that “wogs begin at Calais” attitude we need to get rid of. We should surely instead whenever we spend money on schools and hospitals and the like spend it wherever in the world we think it will most benefit people, since only in that way can we show that we have gone beyond that outdated attitude which dismisses everyone except those living this side of Calais as “wogs”.