Francis Carr Begbie
Occidental Observer
August 31, 2015
With a dazzling smile and expensively-styled long hair, glamorous Dr Ola Orekunrin is a walking advertisement for the new multi-ethnic Britain. Not only was she — at 21 — the youngest person ever to qualify as a doctor but she has since held down important posts at a string of prestigious hospitals.
A shining example, then, of a talented immigrant giving back to the country that had given her so much. Although Nigerian-born she was raised by white foster parents in a Suffolk village and educated by nuns. But she retained her family connections to her homeland so no-one was surprised when she decided to give up the day job and launch an air ambulance service ferrying needy medical cases from Africa to Britain. All above board and paid for privately, of course.
Her venture, Flying Doctors Nigeria, gave her an enviable international profile. She was featured by Time, CNN and the Guardian. She graced the pages of Forbes as one of Africa’s most promising entrepreneurs, and she was a hit on the international conference circuit with her TED talks. She was named a 2013 New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum .
But the flying doctors career plummeted into the ground earlier this year when she was exposed as a liar and fraudster at a London medical disciplinary hearing. She personally jetted in a critically-ill burn victim from Nigeria, ‘dishonestly’ claimed the Nigerian was a UK resident, and obtained NHS treatment costing more than £45,000. This patient was then found to be carrying a deadly superbug infection which meant that one of Britain’s foremost burns treatment centres — a reception centre for injured servicemen — had to be temporarily closed because of the potential risk to other patients. NHS management is so notoriously lax that, if not for that last disaster, she might have been getting away with this racket to this day.
If you think that is bad consider the case of a pregnant Nigerian woman called Bimbo Ayelabola which was on the front page of the Daily Mail this week. She flew into London, promptly had her five(!) babies on the NHS at a cost of £145,000 and then went home without paying the bill. The hospital will not be pursuing her. These are both examples of “health tourism” where foreigners exploit Britain’s lax border controls to fly in, take advantage of health facilities, and leave without paying.
But foreigners criminal expropriation of the NHS can take many forms as in the case of another African doctor, Dr Joseph Kaluba, who worked in Chelmsford. Again it was outside business interests that got him into trouble. Worried hospital administrators noticed that the Zambian consultant was neglecting his duties while making extensive use of computers and phones.
It turned out he was running a property portfolio and car export business from his hospital lab. The histopathologist was so busy that he was ignoring urgent cancer test requests. He has since been struck off but had it not been for his recklessness, he could still be doing it today. As it was, he was able to get away with this between 2009 and 2013 while employed at the Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust.
The two cases were one-offs. But much larger sums, potentially tens of millions a year, are ripped off by more routine and mundane scams such as doctors fraudulently obtaining drugs and sending them to family members abroad. Dr Sukhendu Chattopadhyay abused his position as a ward doctor at Orpington Hospital in Kent, to write scripts for his mother-in-law in India for nearly four years. Amongst Muslim and Hindu NHS staff this practice is thought to be endemic .
There is no greater symbol of Britain’s social capital than the NHS. But it is being eaten alive from the inside by ethnic parasites who have no loyalty to the wider British community. Since its launch in 1948 the National Health Service has provided total medical cover, available to all, free at the point of use and – with only some exceptions – anyone who can prove they are resident in the UK can walk into a hospital and be treated for everything from antenatal screening and long term conditions such as Aids to open heart surgery, accident and emergency treatment and end-of-life care. But the whole system works on trust which you cannot have in a multicultural society where ethnic groups, who do not think of themselves as part of a wider community, see it is a resource to be plundered.
As a BBC documentary showed, the system is wide open to “health tourist” abuse whereby foreign nationals use NHS services to which they are not entitled, place an already overburdened system under intolerable strain. It is a form of predation to which the traditional White population, with their almost reflexive honesty, have no defence.
This is bad enough but it is hardly the only cause for concern. For the competence of these doctors, especially those from Africa, is also deeply worrying.
In another Essex hospital, in Romford, senior consultant surgeon Babatunde Julian Coker was due to remove an appendix but decided to go home for an afternoon nap instead and left the procedure to a junior, Dr Yahya Al-Abed, who should have been at least supervised.
Instead of removing the woman’s appendix he took out a healthy ovary. The patient died 19 days later through loss of blood. Both surgeons were found guilty of “serious professional misconduct” but allowed to keep their jobs and were not struck off.
Partly, this problem is an overhang from the colonial days when far-flung hospitals in Africa and India were originally closely supervised by stern and uncompromising British doctors. That is no longer the case but doctors who may have qualified in cities such as Lagos in Nigeria are still able to go straight onto the wards in Britain. Some even bought their medical qualifications abroad.
A report has indeed concluded that foreign, especially African, doctors working in the NHS are far less safe than their British counterparts. University College London said that the majority of the 88,000 foreign doctors practising the UK would fail exams if held to the same standards as their British colleagues. It called for exams to be toughened up “to ensure patient safety.” It has yet to be acted upon.
The same worries apply to nurses. Managers are so desperate to fill vacancies that they rely on the judgement of grasping recruitment agencies as to whether the nurses can speak English properly. But are they even properly qualified? In one Greater Manchester hospital a male Filipino nurse bought his qualifications by mail order. This man, Victorino Chua, was eventually convicted of murdering “demanding” patients by injecting insulin into their saline bags.
By the 1970s, diseases like TB were long gone from the streets and tenements of inner-city Britain. They were a scourge that had been wiped out by hygiene, education and antibiotics. Now they are back with a vengeance, and London is the European capital of TB. Sufferers from TB, AIDS, malaria and much more, are now flocking to Britain for free treatment courtesy of the NHS.
In 2013 it was revealed that many of the estimated 7,290 TB cases are of a new strain which is drug resistant. So around £11 million had to be set aside for treatment of a disease which had been eradicated in the UK by the 1960s.
And what has been the response of the party that calls itself Conservative? They have placed a statutory obligation on all general practice doctors to treat foreigners without asking about their residency or qualifications. According to EU law, it is their human right (although non-EU immigrants will be charged for hospital treatment; of course, in fact few, if any, actually pay).
The medical establishment has closed its eyes. Why should they worry? Despite the chaos on the wards, the rewards for being a medical professional are greater than ever. One locum (temporary replacement) was recently paid £11,000 for working over the Easter weekend. Unfortunately doctors who do stick their necks out, pay a high price. The only senior consultant who went public about his concerns was hounded out of the profession.
It is hard to get a seat in a doctor’s surgery in many towns these days, so crowded are they with foreigners accompanied by their taxpayer-funded translators. Each individual Muslim immigrant can take in four aged grandparents once they become British citizens. This they seem to take full advantage of as can be seen in countless waiting rooms full of elderly foreigners who cannot speak a word of English, let alone have paid into the system. This is especially true in northern towns such as Bradford, Leeds and Rotherham which have borne the brunt of immigration.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that all this is deliberate. If a politician wanted to surreptitiously destroy the NHS then they could hardly do a better job. The NHS is such a politically untouchable issue that no assault on it can be done in the open. What better solution then, than to run it into the ground with the present covert mass-immigration policy?
It all seems to be going according to plan. The British people are falling out of love with the NHS. They are only too aware that it is being exploited by foreigners who have no right to be here. Those who can afford it are opting out and going private.
As Britain transitions into a low wage, open borders, third world style economy, then it seems it has been decided that a socialised medicine system is a luxury the serfs can do without.
Indeed many politicians do indeed seem to have known what was coming and have lost no time in lining their pockets through lucrative consultancies with healthcare firms sniffing around the profitable parts of the NHS in anticipation of future privatisation.
And what of the flying doctor, Ola Orekunrin? Once she would have been struck off the medical registrar for life. Today the disciplinary panel is drawn from a wider pool which “reflects the diversity of Britain today.” This is presumably a good thing as foreign doctors take up such a huge proportion of the disciplinary workload.
The good news for her is that her six months suspension will be up from the end of August and she free to work in any hospital in the UK again. So it is onward and upward for the flying doctor.