Across emerging markets, the best doctors are often viewed – not least by themselves – as the stars of the show in and out of the (medical) theatre.  They can earn a lot. Top doctors in India make over $1m a year. And they attract hordes of patients.

It’s important, then, for hospital groups to ensure these doctors are happy, and loyal. How do you do this?

Take India, where there’s the lure of travelling to places like the UAE, and the appealing prospect of an oil-fuelled salary higher than they might get at home. How do you satisfy the wanderlust of your most competent consultants and skilled surgeons?

The creative answer – at least for Max Healthcare who we speak to this week – is to provide them with adventure, and toys.

The plan is for adventure is in the form of trips abroad – ‘if you want to work abroad, why not work abroad for us?’. This is the question Max Healthcare is asking its doctors as it enters discussions with CCGs to fly its doctors to the UK to work as their employees, but on UK NHS patients. There’s no need to leave us to work overseas, they will say. That must be an appealing prospect, and four trips in the last five months to the UK, and a flurry of visits up and down the country suggest this plan is being taken very seriously.

As for the ‘toys’ – and we’re really talking about serious, life-saving, expensive pieces of cutting edge technology – there is of course a serious price to be paid for those too. So where is the budget for pieces of equipment like the da Vinci surgical robot which is designed to facilitate complex surgery with a minimally invasive approach – and how do you decide what to buy?

The answer for Max is straightforward. You hold regular meetings where your top clinicians in a field – say neurology – let them argue and debate among themselves about what they want – and then talk about what patient throughput is needed for the machine to pay for itself in a year or two. Your best people are happy because they have the equipment they want – and they’re smart enough to work out how to make it pay.