Hong Kong has been suffering a brain drain after years of enduring first anti-democracy crackdown and more recently Zero Covid lunacy. The Telegraph has the story.
The brain drain that Hong Kong is suffering from as tens of thousands of mainly middle-class, educated professionals seek to escape has become so extreme that even Carrie Lam, the city’s Chief Executive was forced to acknowledge it this week.
“It’s an unarguable fact that we have a brain drain and some senior management of some corporates have left Hong Kong,” she said on Wednesday.
Ms. Lam tried to blame it on the city’s coronavirus restrictions, which have isolated the city with 21-day quarantines on arrival, flight bans and shut infected people away in sparse Government facilities.
But the city has seen more and more people leaving ever since the turbulent pro-democracy protests of 2019.
Hong Kong’s population plunged at a record pace in the 12 months that ended in June 2021, officially putting it at about 7.39 million.
Many Hongkongers have come to the U.K., which opened its doors to them following Beijing’s democracy crackdown.
By December 2021, the U.K. had granted 97,000 visas to Hongkongers under the BNO visa scheme it opened to its former colony in response to the unrest. The Government estimates that by 2026 about 320,000 people will take up the visa, which offers a path to permanent British citizenship.
More than 22,500 Hongkongers have also taken up Canadian permanent residency, work or study permits in 2021, up 256% from 2019.
It’s an exit that does not appear to be slowing down – 43,200 left between March 1st and 15th this year, with over 5,000 recorded on March 6th alone – triggering a bout of hand wringing.
“For a city with a rapidly ageing demographic, financial and legal systems built around high-end human capital, and a culture enriched by overseas workers, the brain drain is both detrimental and disappointing,” opined the South China Morning Post recently.
Teachers and other academics have been particularly hard hit. [John] Lau said he knew he had to leave after the arrest in January last year of 47 prominent pro-democracy figures, including several opposition politicians, who were charged with conspiracy to commit subversion.
He said he did not fear an “imminent” threat but thought it was wise to plan ahead as his pro-democracy views were known.
The academic world had already been shaken by suspicions that colleagues with a history of rights activism had mysteriously failed to have their contracts renewed. Many feared they were secretly being observed and monitored in the classroom.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
But this is the real problem:
February 2024
More than 700 Nigerian nurses under investigation for taking part in ‘industrial-scale’ qualifications fraud could be working in the NHS | Daily Mail Online
May 2024
500 NHS nurses from Nigeria could be struck off over ‘fraudulent or incorrect’ exam results | Daily Mail Online
Some DM comments from the public:
— “And yet you show a photo of a white woman lol”
— “They are the most dishonest people I have come across, they get these false documents as nurses and go and work in care homes exploiting them I have seen them all it’s time someone did some investigation on these care home nurses.”
— “I asked this question 8 years ago and my shifts were cancelled. The hospital know this happens but ignores it, not exactly patient centred care.”
— “It’s obvious when you have to work with them!”
For me the question would be purely an economic one. What is the extra cost to the nation of the training involved, and what cost savings does that drive for the NHS?
But there is the problem : When you have a Communist Health Service, the first thing they do is break all relationship to free market pricing. So answering my question is impossible. And that, of course, is deliberate.
What really happened in Amsterdam…
https://youtu.be/DvTyg1kJGzM?si=-PwR6ncKHSl9utD3
We must be extremely careful what we believe in media in this modern age of misinformation..
Question absolutely everything..
I wont bother saying it…….. Yes i will… I told you so..
Astounding. That confirms what I read about a few days ago, but couldn’t find the link again: that Israeli youths actually started shouting insults and attacking first.
Yep, we seem to now be living in a true post-truth world.
I have a theory, where I spin everything in the msm on its head…. It’s served me well over these years…
Once one accepts that all the msm is one big lie.. You start to think about what was the reason for the lie….
https://youtu.be/LJxBnSyH0T4?si=_rI1AGoLZMb2FYK0
The media is lying to us… Eric Weinstein, what a brain this guy has..
I “checked out” decades ago…
There is so much you could say about this you could write volumes on every avenue and people have done so for those who are interested. I read a study in the Nursing Times a while back, before the recent exacerbation of the crisis, and if I remember correctly a survey found that within two years of working something like eighty percent of nurses reported feeling that they had lost all of their compassion. There was some speculation about the reasons and an acknowledgement that this detoeriotation would inevitable affect patiernt well-being. It is a hard job even under the best of circumstances ie good funding, low patient numbers, high staffing levels. But if you have someone who needs to go to the toilet and you know that they are about number six in your list of priorities because of the workload then perhaps a defensive numbness develops. People from overseas, especially America, often remark when working or receiving treatment within the NHS that it has a military feel which is understandable given its roots. The armed forced send their nursing students to the same lectures and placements as civilian nurses and this works seamlessly. Regardless of the sociopaths and psychopaths the cream of British society work in these institutions. The rot is the deep rot that pervades everything. The Jeremiad stuff is just jive talk which is sometimes disingenuous and more often just naive.
I don’t understand why it is not possible to have both graduate and non-graduate nurses. That would open up more opportunities for people to nurse and deal both with shortages and importing nurses from countries which no doubt need their own.
The problem is that getting well from a substantial illness requires nursing: not just getting the necessary tasks done, but being reconnected with the living: a little TLC, even if it’s ‘tough love’.
When school leavers, aged 16?, went straight into nursing, and on the wards soon after, it was an apprenticeship that included strengthening this connection to other human beings. Now, with the greater emphasis on knowledge and technology, this connection is, in fact, weakened: life becomes driven by theory: yes, a medical theory, but it is still an ideology, impersonal, and not helpful to nursing the sick. It why there are separate doctors and nurses, and patients can tell there’s a difference, even if they are not conscious of it. And once the connections to the rest of humanity, or even the community, are lost, it’s so hard to reconnect. Just look at the current Cabinet, lost in their political bubble, being bewildered by aliens, like farmers, manufacturers, shop keepers, and anyone running a small to medium sized business.
Of course, you can have traditional nursing skills with technical skills, (both nurses and doctors with both are usually outstanding), but emphasising the technical, at the expense of traditional nursing for all entrants, discards so many with the skills lacking in the NHS, and turns it into a regimented outfit, whether Military or Marxist, who cares?
You missed out that the current Cabinet also struggle to define what a ‘working person’ is let alone whether or not they have a penis.
People don’t know and they don’t even make the effort to understand and yet they simultaneously feel entitled to comment on a situation. Nothing new there. It is just intellectual laziness. They wonder why they are so disenfranchised. Maybe if you dig your finger out of your arsehole you might gain some understanding.
Hi standards are what matters. But the mindset of many graduate nurses is of climbing the management ladder ro get out of day to day nursing. We need good front line people to stay in nursing , not ro bugger off to damagement the first chance they get. And the demand foe all nurses to be graduates and for all management candidates to be so, is utterly foolish and quite spiteful by the graduate class.
And, get most of the immigrant nurses out of our NHS
Obviously there are some distinct benefits in training nurses to degree level, but not at the cost of provision of excellent nursing care. The patient essentially depends upon the doctors to determine the treatment and the nurses to administer it safely in a caring and competent manner.
There has been a definite shift in this situation since nurse graduates became the norm.
My own personal experience is that many nurses now regard themselves as too well trained to care for the holistic care of the patient. My own experience of nursing care bordered on what I and the Care Quality Commission considered gross negligence because the nurses mostly ignored the doctors’ instructions choosing to determine their own preferences without any consideration of the considerable medical needs of me the patient. They acted as neither competent nor caring nurses, doctors or health care assistants.
I’ve just written a supporting past, but under another post. But I would like to add that there was a nurse who came into my ward and briskly tidied up anything not in it’s place. She did so, slightly blaming those who had gone before, not vinductively, but to clear the air. It only took a couple of minutes, but I did feel more at ease. She knew what was acceptable, and what wasn’t really tolerable, for long, anyway.
I gather she had been at least a senior sister, and had come back to work, possibly part time, though she could have been like those ‘secret shoppers’ that provide feedback to management.
Whatever, I knew she had been trained in traditional nursing, because she exuded it. In a similar manner, I was, in my youth, a silver service waiter, and those subtle skills learnt were so useful in my career, which was always very technical. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king, or at least he’s less confused than most.
Surely the answer is multiple routes to training.
those that want to be ward nurses only could train in the job and those that wish to specialise, such as theatre or paediatric nurses should do the degree first followed by specialist top up training like the doctors do.
So two heads of university nursing units say that educating nurses at universities is a great idea…..
The problem is a State-run, Socialist health care system. Until people come to terms with that instead of writing about what’s wrong – we know! – and offer solutions to solve the insoluble, nothing will change.
Remove the State monopoly, restore healthcare to the competitive, private sector whence it came before Government nationalised it… starting in 1911 by the way.
Am I right in believing that nurses used to be trained completely on the job but received a small salary and accommodation in a nurses home; then entered the profession as qualified but without any debt? If so, what was wrong with that? If more academic study is required then with day release it could be provided and, if necessary, the course lengthened.