South Indian NRI docs head home

An increasingly large number of non-resident Indian doctors is returning home to south India, giving a third leg to the reverse brain drain phenomenon that mostly involved software engineers and corporate scientists.

A trickle of NRI doctors returning home has been there all around the country for decades now (that is how Apollo Hospitals started), but what marks out the present phase is the accelerating pace and the peninsular focus. The latter is only to be expected since more doctors from the south left India in the first place.

"We get enquiries on a daily basis from NRI doctors wanting to come back," says K Hari Prasad, CEO of Apollo Hospitals, Hyderabad.

On an average, Manipal Hospital, Bangalore, gets five to six resumes every week from NRI doctors in the US and UK. Corporate hospitals in Kerala are seeing a similar inflow of applications.

A good 15 per cent of the doctors at the Kerala Institute of Medical Sciences are former NRIs. Wockhardt hospitals have 28 specialists who have returned to India from abroad. Around 15 former NRI specialists are working with Image Hospitals in Hyderabad and they keep receiving enquiries from doctors seeking jobs in the group.

Says A John Punnoose, CEO, Madras Medical Mission, "Around 80 per cent of the doctors at our hospital in Chennai are former NRIs. I receive around two or three applications from NRI doctors every week, which shows that the trend is on the rise."

"Though it is just over a year since Lifeline Hospitals started operations on Chennai's IT corridor,we already have 13 former NRI doctors, making up a good 24 per cent of the total strength," says M Baskaran, chief executive officer, Lifeline Clinics & Multi-Specialty Hospitals.

Why is this happening? There is both a pull and a push factor. Things are changing rapidly for the better in high-value private health care in India and for the worse for doctors in general in the US and NRI doctors in particular in the UK.

As the economy booms, corporate hospitals are mushrooming all over the country. These are bringing in the latest equipment and their practices and standards are increasingly conforming to globally accepted levels, driven partly by the desire to attract medical tourism.

First, the push factor. V K Kamath, CEO, Apollo Hospitals (Bangalore), says the status of doctors in the US is not what it used to be. Doctors, once among the most respected of professionals, are no longer in that category.

The relative salary of doctors in the US today is not very high as compared to the seventies and eighties when, on an average, they earned much more than those in most other professions.

As for the UK, it is the glass ceiling that has prompted many to return to India.

"There is only a certain level to which a non-White can reach in the UK. The glass ceiling starts to act from then on," said Shabeer Ahmed, a laparoscopy surgeon who had been in Britain since the early 1990s and is now with Wockhardt Hospital. "Here I can use my knowledge in laparoscopy to build something big."

Now the pull factor. According to Dr M I Sahadulla, chairman and managing director of Thiruvananthapuram-based Kerala Institute of Medical Sciences, a premier corporate hospital promoted by NRIs based in the Gulf, "In the past, doctors opted to work in UK and US hospitals as they offered better incomes, top-class medical training and greater job satisfaction. With the Indian healthcare scene now ensuring these aspects, NRI doctors are keen to return. The most important phrase for them is job satisfaction, which they know they will get by working in present-day India's healthcare sector."

Source:Business Standard