‘Indian doctors should avoid Britain’

LONDON: With Prime Minister Gordon Brown announcing that there will be even more stringent checks on foreign medical workers coming to work in Britain, medical organisations are urging Indian doctors to stay away.

“I would tell doctors thinking of coming to the UK to stay in India,” Dr Ramesh Mehta, president of the British Association of Physicians of Indian origin (BAPIO) told DNA.

It had already become hard for Indian doctors to come to the UK and the Glasgow-London terror plot has just made it even more difficult. “That is not just because of the new stringent security checks announced but also because of the lack of jobs now,” continued Mehta.

The number of Indian doctors coming to work in the UK has dwindled in the last couple of years. In 2005 between 6-7,000 doctors came to Britain from India. This number dropped to 2,000 in 2006 and it has become a trickle of a few hundred in 2007. T

he drop has come about due to a change in work permit and visa rules in 2006 designed to encourage using doctors from the European Union rather than from Commonwealth or other countries.

Even so, currently, Indian doctors remain the largest foreign group working in the National Health Service with around 30,000 doctors from India. The second largest group is from Pakistan at 6,000 doctors and medics from West Asia only contribute around 1,000 in total.

After the recent Glasgow-London terror plots, MI5 is expected to be drafted in to help with future checks on foreigners wanting to work in the medical profession in the UK. Sponsors of immigrants coming to work in the NHS will be expected to carry out security checks.

They will be asked to show details of the checks they have carried out on workers in sensitive posts. A ‘sponsors register’ will also be created on which people or bodies would have to be named if they wanted to bring individuals to the UK.

“Those doctors who are already here will not be affected by the review,” said Mehta. He also hoped that there could be no knee-jerk reaction to Indian doctors and that the government and the public would recognise the superb job done by doctors from the sub-continent. Asian medical graduates are now going to be seen with more suspicion.

“We are hoping that the Indian doctors who are being questioned are not the real culprits. After all they are only suspects, they have not been found guilty yet,” said Dr Mehta.