Consultant recruitment from India: the best-fit model?

Abstract

The shortage of consultant psychiatrists has been recognised for some time and in recent years the National Health Service (NHS) has recruited consultants from developing countries. A survey of vacancies by the Department of Health in March 2004 reported that 9.6% of consultant psychiatry posts needed to be filled in England and Wales. The NHS Plan envisaged reform of mental healthcare services by investment in facilities, patient empowerment, reduction of waiting times and determining clinical priorities (Department of Health, 2000) and accepted that the Department of Health could achieve this through its strategy of international recruitment (Department of Health, 2002). Two recruitment campaigns were initiated: Global Recruitment in September 2001 and the International Fellowship Programme in January 2002. A robust process of selection and appointment was set up to ensure that the recruited consultants:. possessed the necessary skills and competency levels to provide the highest quality of clinical care. were able to provide adequate training and supervision to the members of the multidisciplinary team. were able to communicate effectively with patients and other healthcare professionals. possessed all the attributes outlined in the General Medical Council's good medical practice guidelines.

An ingress and a complete transit of HD 80606 b

“…We used the IUCAA Faint Object Spectrograph Camera (IFOSC; Gupta 2002) mounted on the direct Cassegrain focus of the IGO 2‐m telescope. Exposure times were 15–30 s in B and 4–10 s in R .…”

TELICS—A Telescope Instrument Control System for Small/Medium Sized Astronomical Observatories

“…The basic technical requirements of TELICS originated from the idea to integrate high-level controls of various instruments, detectors, and data acquisition in a single framework to reduce complexity and to provide a single interface to the user. For example, the current instruments on the IUCAA Telescope include the IUCAA Faint Object Spectrometer and Camera (IFOSC) with a polarimetric mode (Gupta et al 2002;Ramaprakash 2002), and a Princeton Instrument CCD Imaging System (PI-CCD). In addition, a Near-Infrared PICNIC Imager (NIPI, an infrared imaging system) (Ramaprakash et al 2003) is due to be commissioned on the telescope.…”

“…Here we describe the design and development of such a control system, the TELICS-TELescope Instrument Control System, developed for the IUCAA Girawali Observatory (IGO) which houses a modern 2 m, f/10 telescope located at Girawali near Pune, India (Tandon 1998;Gupta et al 2002). The TELICS system fulfills the requirements of any small and medium size (i.e., less than 4 m diameter telescope) observatory.…”