NPR series on global health continues
National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” began its series on global health by focusing on the rapidly developing high-quality hospitals being developed in countries like India. Now the focus is on doctors — specifically, Indian doctors who are giving up medical practices in the U.S. to return home.
NPR correspondent Richard Knox reports:
Soon India’s middle class will be as large as the entire U.S. population. For-profit hospitals like Wockhardt’s are springing up all over to serve these patients. And they’re offering signing bonuses and stock options to attract doctors from America. Often their Web sites boast of the number of American board-certified physicians on their staffs.
That has many Indian doctors in America thinking about going home.
Over a cup of coffee on the Harvard Medical Area campus in Boston, 8,000 miles from Bangalore, Dr. Manas Kaushik talks about the emigration of Indian doctors.
Kaushik is Indian himself. He has done research at the Harvard School of Public Health on the brain drain of doctors out of India. He tracked hundreds of graduates from the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, India’s equivalent of Harvard Medical School. He looked at alumni dating back to the 1950s.
“Over this period, we roughly had 450 physicians who graduated from the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences,” Kaushik says. “And almost 50 percent of them emigrated to the U.S.”
In 50 years, Kaushik says, only one of those doctor-emigrants went back to India — and he returned to America a year later.
No other country has exported as many physicians as India. More than 40,000 practice in the United States, making up one of every 20 U.S. doctors.
But Kaushik says the tide is beginning to turn. There are no statistics, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that Indian doctors are buzzing about the new opportunities to practice American-style medicine in India.
“I’m a recent immigrant myself, and I’ve talked to a lot of my friends who have made tough decisions about moving to the U.S., and some of them are thinking of going back,” Kaushik says.
“I’m a recent immigrant myself, and I’ve talked to a lot of my friends who have made tough decisions about moving to the U.S., and some of them are thinking of going back,”
This confirms the failure of Equal Opportunity policies in the U.S. Those who ‘go back’ need to feel ownership in India.Otherwise they would tend to ‘instruct’ and ‘dictate’ rather than serve.
This was/is an issue in Sri Lanka also. During Tsunami Reconstruction, international medical teams made up largely by Westerners tended to ‘instruct’ and dispense from a superior position. There was little connection with the patients they claimed to ’serve’. When we feel that the patient is within us - we treat ourselves and that is service. The rest is business and needs strict ‘business’ code of conduct where costs and benefits are transparent.