FOREIGN staff have been crucial to the smooth running of the National Health Service ever since it was founded almost 50 years ago.

Whether we're talking Caribbean cleaners or Indian doctors, the NHS simply wouldn't have been able to operate (excuse the pun) without the help of a labour force drawn from the four corners of the former Empire.

More recently, it has been our friends in the European Union who have helped us plug our medical skills shortage.

Polish dentists have already

been filling in (pun wholly intended) in Malvern, and now we find that a German doctor is doing the rounds in Malvern and Worcester.

Do we care?

We're certainly used to foreign faces and voices in our hospitals and clinics, and the patients being seen by this healing Hans would no doubt rather have a doctor from Munich or Hamburg than no doctor at all.

There's no doubt any qualified doctor from another EU nation would be just as competent as one trained in the UK, so there's nothing to worry about there.

The only problem is money.

Foreign doctors are employed through medical agencies, who, of course, take their cut.

Worcestershire's health services has got into financial difficulties in the past after forking out a fortune on agency nurses.

We're happy to be treated by foreign doctors, but not if it means there's less money for the rest of the health service.