Britain's imported MDs scratch noggins over language

When Thorsten Ahlert saw his first patients in England, his dictionary was almost as useful as his stethoscope. The German doctor, enticed to Britain by the prospect of lucrative work as a stand-in family physician, initially found accents more perplexing than ailments.

After all, when patients come in complaining of problems with their "lugholes" or "sneck," it takes a bit of local knowledge to understand what they're talking about.

"I had to get used to the slang," he says. "It was difficult in the beginning, but I had my dictionary there. One patient did look a little strange when I had to look up 'chicken pox.' "

The language barrier is only one of several hurdles facing a new contingent of foreign doctors recruited by Britain as part of an energetic drive to bring in hundreds of physicians from overseas, particularly from Europe and Asia. The Labour government urgently needs the manpower to live up to its electoral pledge to modernize the rundown National Health Service (NHS). The promise was to invest more than £100 billion ($180 billion) over 10 years in the NHS and attract 10,000 new doctors by 2005. Training such numbers would take years.

"The NHS is expanding a lot and we need more doctors - we always need increased capacity," says one health-department official, who requested anonymity. "We are training our own doctors, but in the short term you have to wait five or six years for a doctor to come through medical school. There are lots of doctors from overseas who want to come here."

The upshot has been a succession of recruitment fairs over the past two years - in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Spain - to bring in hundreds of family doctors, or general practitioners (GPs) as they are also known.

The influx has created teething problems, some amusing - like the language confusion - some more serious. Recruitment in south Asia has inadvertently lured a flood of thousands of interns, for whom there is not such need.

"People are coming and getting stuck," notes Shiv Pande, chairman of the Overseas Doctors Association, an independent representative body. Dr. Pande says as many as 8,000 interns from South Asia are stuck in limbo, sharing crowded accommodations and getting into financial difficulties. The average hopeful takes 11 months to find a job, he says. He says there are around 500 applicants for each vacancy.

"Some end up filling shelves at the local supermarket," he says. "I've seen doctors crying like a child because they are not able to meet their aspiration. It's a disgrace on the noble profession of medicine. It's a waste of medical manpower for India and Britain."

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