"Worse than Being Married": The Exodus of British Doctors from the National Health Service to Canada, c. 1955-75
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite a sizeable literature on the evolution of health insurance in Britain and Canada, there is virtually no research on the transnational migration of physicians between these countries in the immediate postwar period. This article hopes to address this neglected subject. Three inter-related topics will be examined. First, the paper will summarize the debate over physician emigration from the National Health Service (NHS) in postwar Britain. It will demonstrate how British social scientists and politicians began to come to grips with a major demographic exodus of British-trained doctors in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Second, it will analyze the changing health human resource situation in 1960s Canada, which focused, for practical and cultural reasons, on General Medical Council of Britain licensed practitioners. Third, through oral interviews of British-trained physicians who settled in Canada during the 1960s, it will examine the professional and personal reasons why physicians left Britain for Canada. It reveals that, among a myriad of personal issues that motivated a physician to leave the NHS, the inflexibility and hierarchical nature of British medicine loomed very large. The paper will conclude by reflecting on the contemporary significance of this fascinating historical phenomenon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".