I was astounded when I read about the case of Dr. Sulieman Al Hourani, the Jordanian locum surgeon who used to work at the Fairfield General Hospital and who, as reported by the British press earlier this year, in September 2007 cut off a patient's testicle 'by mistake' during an operation intended to remove a cyst. The same reports also mentioned various instances of misconduct, such as theft of medicine (two boxes of dihydrocodeine) and his injecting himself with a drug meant for a patient. Such spectacular failure to protect NHS patients from dubious characters who are clearly unfit to practice medicine, particularly in a climate where we are constantly told that the NHS will collapse overnight absent the skills brought by immigration and foreign labour, needed commenting upon. It is not that we should now conclude that all surgeons in the NHS are routinely castrating patients while high on drugs stolen from treatment rooms; or that the totality of foreign-born NHS personnel consists of bungling idiots -- rather, it is the fact that such an extreme case of incompetence and unfitness in a foreign-born interim NHS worker, the fact that such an individual made it through the selection process and into an operating theatre, in a context where public and private sector employers are under constant and intense pressure not to discriminate in any way on grounds of race or national origin, leads one inevitably to the question: should I worry every time I see a coloured worker that he might not really be qualified for the job he holds because he was hired, and put in a position of responsibility, only so that his employer could fulfill an ethnic quota? Read my comments here.