Whenever immigration into the UK is discussed on radio or television or within the media generally, they trot out the old chestnut that the National Health Service (NHS) relies on doctors, nurses and other health workers from overseas and that without them ‘the NHS would collapse’. The inference being that without immigration we would have no functioning national health service. Of course it is true that a large proportion of the staff in our hospitals and…

By Max Musson: During the 1960s there where very few foreign doctors or nurses employed within the National Health Service, and if one needed hospital treatment or visited one’s general practitioner, encountering a foreign or non-White doctor or nurse was a rarity rather then the commonplace event it is today.  We are told when the subject of immigration is discussed, that the NHS today depends on immigrant doctors and nurses and would collapse without them,…