Chair: Hilary Marland

Abstract

The creation of the National Health Service (1948) unleashed a pent-up demand for medical services, necessitating an urgent infusion of health care practitioners. Yet, at the same time, hundreds of British-trained doctors and nurses began leaving Britain for other industrialized countries, the largest cohort relocating to Canada.  Britain responded to the health human resource crisis by recruiting Commonwealth nurses and doctors to fill vacant positions. Canada, for its part, eagerly accepted General Medical Council registered practitioners and British-trained nurses to service rural and remote regions of the country, areas that had themselves been depleted by an annual out-migration of Canadian-trained health care practitioners to the United States.  This paper examines the complicated network of international medical migration in the second half of the twentieth century, informed as it was by decolonialization, global inequality, and preferential immigration. It will highlight how Britain and Canada shared a unique position in the history of post-WWII “medical mobilities” as the only two countries in the world that ranked in the World Health Organization’s Top 10 nations in terms of losing, and gaining, medical personnel.