Achilles Heal

Indian Doctors Wait On UK Legal Challenge

As every major media organisation has pointed out in the past 24 hours, the careers of about 15,000 Indian doctors and medical students in the UK are extremely bleak. It's a far cry from a great article I read in one of the British papers about a decade ago. I cannot recall if it was in `The Times' or `The Guardian' but the article was extremely supportive of Indian doctors in Great Britain.
In an interesting twist when compared with the current situation, the article pointed out that many patients throughout Britain were lamenting an unfortunate double whammy - the fact that their Indian-born GPs were getting close to retirement age and that the doctors' children were shunning medicine in favour of jobs in the IT sector.
Many patients pointed out that they would have felt much happier if the doctors' children had taken over their respective practises. Instead, the patients now faced the prospect of seeking out new doctors once their own Indian doctors retired. It was an unprecedented swell of public opinion in favour of Indian medical professionals.
How times have changed. The solitary lifeline now available to the thousands of Indian doctors and medical students in Britain is a legal challenge to be launched on Monday by the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO) in the Appeals Court on Monday, seeking a stay on a new immigration law abolishing permit-free training for overseas doctors, most of whom just happen to be Indians.
A recent update on the The Times Of India website quotes Ramesh Mehta, president of BAPIO, who said, "We have decided to file an appeal against the judgment of the High Court and seek a stay order on the new regulation."
At issue is the UK immigration law of April 3 last year which stipulates that doctors from countries outside the European Union need a work permit to train in Britain. To put this in human perspective, if BAPIO fails to get a stay order, the thousands of doctors of Indian origin who went to Britain under the permit-free training rule will have to leave the country. This is because the Department of Health abolished permit-free training in April 2006 in an attempt to streamline the recruitment process.
As anyone who has lived in Britain and has ever visited the country will tell you, Indian doctors have been the backbone of the National Health Service in Britain and comprise nearly one-third of the total strength of doctors in the country.
Edwin Borman, chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA)'s International Committee, said: ``The government's recent treatment of overseas doctors has been very disappointing. They were given the impression that they would be able to contribute to the NHS, and spend their whole careers in the UK, then the rules changed overnight and many were forced to leave. The failure of the government to consult with the medical profession meant that they had little
opportunity to prepare to leave the country."
There is a strong signal in this for the Blair Government - it needs to get serious about the issue of consultative, long-term workforce planning.