Israel offers £30k lure to UK doctors 18/01/2008 By Rachel Fletcher British doctors could receive grants of $60,000 to practise in Israel under a new scheme to address the country’s shortage of physicians. Aliyah-promoting organisation Nefesh B’Nefesh is launching the incentive scheme — called the Physician Aliyah Fellowship — via its Legacy Heritage Fund in a bid to encourage North American and British doctors to move to Israel. The $60,000 (£30,500) grants are available for doctors under the age of 40 who have completed their training in North America and the UK and are willing to work for at least nine months a year in Israel. Doctors would receive a fellowship on arrival and monthly supplementary income for the first two years. The scheme comes after the planning and budgeting committee of Israel’s Council for Higher Education released figures suggesting that the country would experience a serious doctor shortage in the next 10 years. The report predicts that the current ratio of 3.5 doctors for every 1,000 Israelis will drop to less than 2.5 per 1,000 in the coming years. The reasons are population increase, especially among the elderly, and the trend for doctors to leave the profession. Nefesh B’Nefesh executive director Rabbi Yehoshua Fass said: “While currently many physicians making aliyah prefer to continue their practices abroad, this fellowship will enable doctors to remain in Israel and sustain their careers domestically.” A trainee obstetrician and gynaecologist from North London, who did not want to be named, said: “It’s not very nice to let another country pay thousands and thousands to train doctors and then try to entice them away. And £30,000 isn’t much incentive for two years; in a consultant post you could earn a lot more here. This will appeal only to people who would have made aliyah anyway. I can’t see many doctors going on this only to further their careers.” A Jewish trainee anaesthetist felt the scheme was unlikely to appeal to qualified doctors who were in training posts. “Unless I was willing to possibly give up my post, it wouldn’t be practical. It would depend on how much you wanted to work in Israel.” A BMA spokesman said: “There is a growing problem of doctors who, having completed their training in the UK, find it harder than they would in the past to find a consultant post. Workforce planning in the UK has been quite poor. If people do feel the need to go overseas to work as doctors, then that is the UK’s loss.”