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Notes -
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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