Called the "flying doctors," Polish general practitioners have become veritable part-time migrants who work regular night shifts here to fill a vacuum left by their British or Irish counterparts.
"All the patients in the world are the same," according to Agata Slawin, 40, a native of the southwestern Polish city of Wroclaw who spends one weekend out of two at Craigavon Hospital in the heart of Northern Ireland.
Why would Slawin, a mother of two who has her own practice in Wroclaw, fly to the other end of Europe to do night shifts at weekends?
For one thing, she said she can earn four to five times as much in Northern Ireland. By doing four shifts in two days, Slawin can go back home with a check for ?1,500 (US$2,850).
Though she has to cover her travel costs, the plane ticket between Wroclaw and Dublin only costs about ?100 thanks to budget airlines.
For another, she added, the experience itself is valuable.
"It's a great opportunity to exchange our experience, between Polish and Irish doctors," Slawin said. "Generally skill sharing between European doctors is very beneficial for patients and medicine."
To provide round-the-clock public health care, Britain's National Health Service has tried to hire enough doctors from Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales as well as from across the border in the Republic of Ireland.
With the EU acquiring new eastern European member states in May 2004, the authorities in the British province launched a campaign to hire doctors from the new member countries.
"I understand the Polish system is quite similar to ours, so it was easy for our Polish colleagues to come over and integrate well in the service we have in Northern Ireland," said Ruth Rogers, spokeswoman at the Southern Health and Social Services Board.
For two years, six "flying doctors" have provided regular consultations and a seventh is being recruited. Moreover, eight Polish doctors are now based semi-permanently in Northern Ireland. All of them have maintained their practices in Poland.
"I saw an advertisement by headhunters in the local press in Wroclaw. I had a word with my wife [who said] if you really have to go you go, but we'll wait and see what happens," said Mariusz Domanski.
For 18 months he has been spending three weeks out of four at the Daisy Hill hospital in Newry, a town bordering the Republic of Ireland, where he has been doing night shifts.
In order to learn more about Ireland, Domanski has rented a room with a Northern Irish family because his wife and four children prefer to remain behind in Poland.
"I was very afraid to see my first patient, afraid they would not understand me. But people are very polite here, much more than in Poland. I can't say I had any bad experience. " he said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS