NHS: Global Health

Lord Jay of Ewelme Excerpts

Monday 20th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jay of Ewelme]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, on initiating this debate. I declare an interest as chair of the international medical aid charity Merlin, which operates in the poorest countries after conflict and natural disasters. It is from that perspective that I want to speak this evening.

There is a long and fine tradition of trained British doctors and medical staff working in poor countries, bringing expertise, training medical staff on the ground and saving lives. To take one example, more than 70 NHS staff with different skills have worked with Merlin surgical teams in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. This should not be seen just as altruism, important though that is. As the noble Lord, Lord McColl said, it should be encouraged as part of medical training in this country. Like so much in today’s world, medicine is global. This country will benefit directly if the doctors and other medical staff working here bring with them first-hand experience of conditions and diseases elsewhere in the world.

To give one other example, health staff who worked with Merlin on HIV and TB control programmes in Russia and Kenya have gone on to work in an NHS trust that covers Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham, which have some of the highest rates of those diseases in the United Kingdom. That is to our advantage, as well as the advantage of those they are helping in other countries. So I do strongly support the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, that medical training and practice in the UK should encourage and certainly not disadvantage those many British medical staff who wish to spend part of their training or part of their professional life working in poor countries. It seems to me heartening that so many medical staff training and working here should want to spend time working in developing countries and it is very much in our interest that we should encourage them in that laudable aim. There are, of course, problems but it really is in our interest to overcome those and to encourage, for example, deans of medical schools to use their existing discretion to encourage staff to serve in developing countries.

I was reading this afternoon the document Liberating the NHS. It states:

“We want everyone who works in the NHS to reach their full potential and achieve better health outcomes for their patients”.

Indeed we do, but it seems to me that working in developing countries and the experience our staff get there is an essential part of achieving that objective. We are right to be proud of the quality of our medical staff in this country and we are right to be proud, too, of those who wish to spend time helping others in poorer countries. Those two things should go together and not in any way be in conflict. It is very much in our interest that that should be so and, like others, I look forward to the Minister’s comments on that particular point.