A fascinating exhibition ‘Migrants who made the NHS’ has been installed on the ground floor of the RCGP, and runs until December 2018. It provides striking background information and displays about the staffing crisis in general practice when, in the wake of the Collings Report on general practice in England in 1950 and in the face of massive over-investment in hospital medicine, there was an exodus of British GPs to countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. There are dramatic displays depicting the appalling racial discrimination faced by these doctors, particularly women, and some equally moving accounts of how these adversities were overcome.
Many of the new Asian GPs were great innovators — they built state-of-the-art health centres, and the first ever GP cooperative was established in Bolton in 1976. Outside the surgery many Asian GPs became active and prominent in local and national civic and medical politics, including the foundation of the Overseas Doctors Association and work in the RCGP.
The debt that we owe them for resuscitating general practice at a time of peril is immense.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2018