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From my experience talking to Anglosphere doctors, you would instantly collapse British, Canadian, South African, and probably Australian/New Zealand healthcare if you opened up the American medical system. (Don't laugh about the South Africans, they turn out some incredible doctors.) The big issue I've heard from them is less about the objective difficulty of getting US certified, and more that you're sacrificing even more years of your youth on a particularly pointless altar.
I 100% believe they want to come here for South African (I actually had supervisor at one point who was South African, he was incredible). Australian, and NZ healthcare actually pays comparable to the U.S. to the point where we have people going there. I'm sure if you opened it up you'd get a mix in both directions. Canada is already pretty open to transfer with the U.S. is my understanding with some jobs making the same some making less, some making more.
Britain is the odd one. Granted redoing say IM/FM/Peds/EM residency here is only three years and be a huge life gain. They don't seem to sign up for it. Most of the time I see this online it's associated with a bunch of anti-Americanism.
It isn't just "three years" - it's "three years of hell", and if you are doing it for the second time to tick a bureaucratic box, it's unedifying hell. People who are already upper-middle class don't put themselves through just to double their salary. You either need to offer enough upside potential to take the winners out of the upper-middle class (startup founders, finance jobs) or something that speaks to the soul.
Also those are the specialties that are at the bottom of the food chain in the US in a way they are not in the UK, so they are the ones where the benefit of moving is least. NHS GPs who want to graft can make as much money as successful surgeons.
I was initially going to say something about this not being be that bad in those specialties and then realized my understanding of what is too much work is now pretty much forever broken.
And yeah it's bad, but it's instructive. I am amenable to the idea that every hour of US and UK training are roughly equivalent, but if US trained physicians are getting that many more hours of training it really does a decent amount to justify the need to retrain to US standards. Yes those hours rapidly have diminishing returns, but I find most foreign doctors are willing to admit that training is better and more thorough here (in part because of stupid oddities of our system, in part because we have more resources than everywhere else, or our population is less healthy, or just sheer weight of hours).
I wasn't claiming that US residency was worse than being a junior doctor in the NHS (I have no idea if it is or not) - I was saying that being an early-career medic is a crapsack lifestyle anywhere because of the intensity of the training plus the amount of medical scutwork you have to do to justify the senior doctors paying attention to you plus the hazing element of it all.
Three years of "hell" that gives you the power to heal the sick is worth it for both career and soul reasons. Doing it again for mere money when you already have a ticket to the upper-middle class - well I'm sure the dignity of a British doctor has a price, but it isn't cheap.
We do see that people from all kinds of other countries (most famously India) that are willing to come to the U.S. and retrain (and need to) in order to get a dramatically increased salary and actually live in the U.S (I would).
Not sure I'd make the same decision coming from the UK.
I do think UK doctors honestly should retrain, just less than those from third world countries.
The difference between a 100% raise and 2000% one is pretty big.
People for the most part don't even go the short distance over the border between Sweden and Norway, despite it being a common regulatory market and 50-100% salary differential for healthcare professionals.
Truth is that doctors are comfortably in top part of the upper middleclass already and Sweden is a nice enough place to live so why leave all your friends and relatives behind for just a bit more money? A few do but thats almost exclusively younger people that spend a few years making money in order to buy a house back home.
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Why, when doctors who are willing to cross oceans can get most but not all of the benefits of moving to America without retraining by moving to Australia instead? You would need to have an unusually serious money-solvable problem to make it worth redoing residency for the delta between US and Australian doctors' incomes.
I don't think it would be difficult for the US to compete with Australia for disgruntled British doctors, but right now they aren't trying.
Are they going from UK to Australia? I know it is easy for us because we don't have to retrain but we also have the hardest training.
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