In the wake of the Scottish burning SUV catastrophe, one of the hot TV news obsessions is foreign-trained doctors, since six doctors from abroad have been detained or questioned in that investigation.
I was watching CNN today and one reporter mentioned that 37% of doctors in the United Kingdom are “qualified overseas”. That seems a little high to me. I was curios to compare it to the percentage in the United States.
According to this New England Journal of Medicine article (2005), 25% of the U.S. physician workforce is trained abroad (see Table 1). But according to the same study, 28% of UK doctors are international graduates. [This study cited 39,000 international doctors, while the CNN reporter said there are 89,000.]
That discrepancy aside, it’s evident there’s many international doctors practicing in the U.S., probably approaching the percentage in the U.K.
So the question lies ready to be explored by the enterprising mind of a worry-wort American reporter: “Could it happen here? Could your doctor be part of an al Qaeda sleeper cell?”
