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Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Scheme

Like other noble Lords, I warmly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Luce, on having secured the debate. I want simply to tell the human story of Commonwealth scholarships, perhaps in a much more humble way than others have cited. I am not talking about great political leaders or deputy Prime Ministers; I want to talk about the five students in my department at Cardiff University, who have been Commonwealth scholars since 2006. That cohort entered and competitively gained scholarships—three from India and two from Pakistan. They were all highly motivated. One lad had to drop out because his father was desperately ill and he could not combine study with caring for him. That scholarship has been awarded to another student. The others have done astoundingly well. I shall name them because I think that they deserve it. They are Dr Jeba and Dr Barathi from India and Dr Rozilla Khan from Pakistan. They all passed phase one of their courses in the top third. Two—Dr Jeba and Dr Barathi—were in the top 10 per cent. Dr Jeba went on, in phase two, to be the top student out of the whole of the world cohort that we have on our course and won the Cicely Saunders medal. She is now undertaking her MSc, as is Dr Khan. Dr Barathi will start next year. They all started with moderate communication skills. One of them, Dr John, had communication skills that would not pass our criteria. However, they have all improved so much that we are training them up as facilitators. These are medical readers in their own parts of their own country. Dr Kahn is a gynaecologist, who looks after thousands of women every year dying from cancer of the cervix, with terrible pain and haemorrhaging and those with carcinoma of the ovary, who die with intestinal obstruction. She describes her own practice as having radically altered and is actively teaching others while she is studying. There is a real ripple-on-the-pond effect from these scholarships. The other two, Dr Jeba and Dr Barathi, will certainly be major leaders in the academic discipline of palliative medicine as it develops across India. They are already affecting clinical practice enormously. Is this expensive? It costs £8,776 to educate each one of those right through to MSc level. I do not think that that is a huge expenditure, but the impact of that money is absolutely phenomenal. These students have enriched our course and taught the other students what it is like to work in an area in which healthcare is desperately under-resourced, where they are hitting old-fashioned attitudes and need to change how things happen in their society. I simply make the plea that the distance-learning courses to which the noble Lord, Lord Luce, referred and the medical courses that I asked the Minister about when we debated this matter after a Question in May are somehow allowed to continue. They represent true humanitarian aid, which affect how people live and how their families can live when faced with devastating disease in areas of the country, irrespective of the economic growth, which medically are way behind and drastically under-resourced. These are terribly important scholarships.