Last year, 341 Jamaicans graduated with first degrees in medicine at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI). This was over 93 per cent of all graduates from Mona's medical school and 14 per cent of all Jamaicans, who left the campus with first degrees.

These numbers seem impressive and good for Jamaica. Except that, given the trend, about 70 per cent of these graduates, once they complete their internships and become full-fledged doctors, can be expected to emigrate.

That is bad for Jamaica, and particularly tax-payers, for training a doctor is not cheap, costing, perhaps, three times or more as gaining a liberal arts degree. In Jamaica, as is the case for all Jamaicans who attend UWI, taxpayers take up 80 per cent of the bill. It is not unreasonable that they should expect a reasonable return on their investment, or consider putting their resources elsewhere.

Impressive performance

The point here is that despite Jamaica's relatively impressive performance in recent years in training doctors, there is no sign that the country is awash with physicians, or that Jamaica is at the Pan American Health Organisation's standard of at least one doctor for every 910 of the population. That would mean about 3,000 doctors working in Jamaica.

That number of Jamaican doctors, however, as an October 2005 article in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested, is more likely to be found in the United States, Britain and Canada. Indeed, it was estimated that year that about 1,600 Jamaican doctors, or 40 per cent of the island's physicians had emigrated to these countries - either having gone on their own steam or were induced by recruiters.

In this global market, no one could contemplate placing limits on where people can take their skills. It would seem to us, though, that it is the responsibility of governments to shape public policy in the best interest of society and for the delivery of best value to people.

Social investment

Our suggestion in this regard - as we proposed before - is for the Government to realign its education subsidies and demand some level of social investment from those who receive these subsidies. For instance, it may be prudent to lower the taxpayers' portion, in dollar terms, of financing a doctor's education closer to the cost of other degrees, but going further if the doctor agrees to be bonded to work in the public sector for three years in community health service.

We believe, too, it may be prudent to divert some of the resources allocated to training in the humanities and social sciences - which account for 75 per cent of Jamaica's UWI graduates - to train engineers or agriculturalists. As we noted before, a mere 28 Jamaicans graduated from UWI last year with engineering degrees, or less than one per cent of all graduates.

Jamaican engineering graduates equated to seven-and-half per cent of the Trinidadians who left UWI with degrees in those disciplines. In the case of Barbados, its 35 engineering graduates were a quarter more than Jamaica's.

The realignment, we insist, is urgent if Jamaica is intent on building a modern economy. And, asking people to give back to society in exchange for their education is neither new nor novel. It is precisely what Barack Obama is proposing in America.

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