The trust, covering Middlesbrough and Hartlepool, says it has an acute problem in holding on to British-trained doctors

A hospital trust struggling to recruit British doctors has turned to refugees from Iraq and Syria to help combat staff shortages.

The trust, covering Middlesbrough and Hartlepool, says it has an acute problem in holding on to British-trained doctors.

Now a pioneering scheme is paying for 11 refugee doctors to take the medical and language exams they need to pass in order to apply for jobs in the NHS.

The cost, which is being met by Health Education England, is estimated to be under £3,000 per doctor.

This is far less than the £163,000 bill to train a British doctor. But local politicians last night said the move was a publicity stunt that papers over failures to properly tackle the NHS staffing crisis.

The pilot scheme was opened to those who had been granted asylum. It involves one pharmacist and 11 doctors from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan.

No bailouts! NHS overspenders face shutdown Hospital units face closure in areas which have overspent their budgets. NHS chiefs are drawing up lists of centres that will have to make ‘difficult choices’. A report published by NHS England warns that some districts and services are effectively relying on ‘bailouts’ from other parts of the country. It said: ‘Some organisations and geographies have historically been substantially overspending their fair shares of NHS funding and their control totals. ‘In effect they have been living off bailouts arbitrarily taken from other parts of the country or from services such as mental health. This is no longer affordable or desirable.’ The authors warned that action would be taken in the next 12 months to cut back services that are overspending. ‘Going into 2017/18 it is critical that those geographies that are significantly out of balance now confront the difficult choices they have to take,’ they said. ‘Where necessary this may mean explicitly scaling back spending on locally unaffordable services.’ Any cutbacks or closures are expected to be made as part of a ‘sustainability and transformation plan’. The Health Service Journal, which revealed the cutbacks proposal, calculated that Staffordshire was the most likely to face cuts, having breached its control total by £68million last year. The Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire area overspent by £45million, 3 per cent of its income. An NHS England spokesman said: ‘It is grossly unfair if one part of the country continually overspends at the expense of other areas.’ Advertisement

The doctors will take a test under the International English Language Testing System to prove they are a ‘good to very good user’ of English and have an ‘operational command of the language’.

Next they will undergo tests of their medical competence and language carried out by the Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board. These tests are taken by all doctors outside the EU seeking to work in the UK.

They will then be supported to get jobs, but none will be paid until they are registered with the General Medical Council and working for the NHS.

Organisers stress that the refugee doctors will not carry out any clinical duties until they have full GMC registration.

The refugees are the first recruits for the Refugees Programme for Overseas Doctors, set up between the North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust and a Middlesbrough-based charity called Investing in People and Culture.

The scheme began in December and the first intake are expected to begin clinical training placements soon.

Professor Jane Metcalf, deputy medical director of the trust, said: ‘The programme has the potential to provide much-needed support for the NHS.

‘This area of the country has a particularly acute problem in recruiting and retaining doctors so a side effect of the programme will be to fill gaps we couldn’t otherwise fill. These are early days but it is looking really promising.’

But local representatives have raised concerns that the trust has failed to put more long-term measures in place to retain staff.

Ray Martin-Wells, a Conservative councillor, said: ‘Good publicity for the trust is one thing but good patient safety is another. One would hope we’re not going to be putting these people in a position where they are out of their depth.’

Ukip councillor John Tennant, leader of the official opposition at Hartlepool Borough Council, added: ‘This can’t be a long-term solution. In Hartlepool we have internationally recognised services, but we’re slowly losing the people who provide those services.’

But Karen Wilkinson-Bell, chairman of Investing in People and Culture, said: ‘These people are skilled doctors and yet some were surviving by delivering pizzas.

‘Now, for a relatively small investment, this programme is achieving great things on a humanitarian level while also benefiting our local area immensely by plugging gaps in the NHS.’

The recruits include orthopaedic specialist Ahmad Zia Baluch, who fled Afghanistan a year ago with his family after he became a target of the Taliban because of translation work he did for Nato.