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Indian hospitals wooing back British NRI doctors

India is now experiencing a reverse brain-drain with its well resourced hospitals with state of the art facilities wooing back a sizable number of NRI doctors.

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LONDON: India is now experiencing a reverse brain-drain with its well resourced hospitals with state of the art facilities wooing back a sizable number of NRI doctors, who worked with the National Health Service of Britain for years.
 
Quoting the director of one of India's leading private hospital chains, The Sunday Times reported that he was receiving five job applications a week from NHS doctors and that half his 3,000 consultants were from Britain.
 
"There's a feeling that India's time has come and there's a huge need for these people to come back," Anupam Sibal, director of the Apollo hospital in Delhi said.
 
Doctors say they are moving to India because of its economy, state of the art equipment, higher standards than the NHS and a better quality of life. In particular, they say hospitals in India, which many Britons still imagine to be impoverished and dirty, suffer less from hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA.
 
There has been a boom in private hospitals in India that resemble luxury hotels, with marble foyers and corridors mopped by an army of liveried cleaners.
 
One of those who has made the transition is Mahesh Kulkarni, an orthopaedic surgeon, who left Bristol Royal Infirmary after 10 years in Britain. He is now a consultant at the Aditya Birla Memorial Hospital in Pune.
 
"The hospitals are better than in Britain," he said. "The hospital is spotless and clean compared with the old hospitals in the UK, some of which are more than 100 years old. I started in January this year and I have not seen MRSA here yet."
 
Ameet Kishore had worked as an ear, nose and throat consultant in Glasgow Royal Infirmary for 12 years when he moved to the Apollo hospital in Delhi two years ago. He said the new Indian hospitals were cleaner and better resourced.
 
Other doctors cited new European Union rules for their decision to move. Shailendra Magdam, a specialist registrar in neurosurgery at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford until he left for India in August last year, said that rules favouring EU doctors over Indians had played a part.
 
He said the EU's working time directive had also lowered NHS standards, by restricting the amount of time that young doctors could spend on the wards.
 
"For a neurosurgeon to be good you have to spend a lot of time  on the wards, but in Britain the working time directive is running down training," he said.
 
Although salaries are usually lower in India, doctors are finding that their standard of living is better. Kishore said he lived in a bigger house with a driver, cleaner, cook, nanny and watchman to look after him, his wife and two young children.

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