BAPIO has welcomed the latest decision by the Department of Health allowing 12,000 Indian doctors to be considered for the first round of NHS jobs.
LONDON: The British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO) welcomed the latest decision by the Department of Health allowing 12,000 Indian doctors to be considered for the first round of NHS jobs in a temporary reprieve from the new immigration laws.
“This will mean that all doctors applying for the 21,000 jobs will be treated equally and the short listing will be based on merit rather than nationality,” Dr Ramesh Mehta, BAPIO president told DNA.
“This is in the best interest of the British public too as they deserve the best doctors. We are happy that the Department of Health has responded sensibly,” he added, saying they will continue their fight against the new laws, which they consider discriminatory. BAPIO has been in the forefront of the legal battle to review the new rules and are planning to appeal the February 9 verdict that disallowed the judicial review. “We have already collected £75,000 of the £1,00,000 that we need for the appeal,” said Dr Mehta.
More than 30,000 doctors applied for the 21,000 jobs with the NHS and of them 12,000 applicants are Indian. After the shortlist is announced on Monday, interviews will take place in the first week of March. The new immigration rules demand that employers have to prove that they had no appropriate candidates from the UK and EU before offering it to non-EU candidates.
This has meant that around 16,000 doctors from South Asia who have been working here now require a work permit to practise here and would also be at a disadvantage in the competition for jobs. “Indian doctors would only get the jobs that no one else wanted, not the ones they wanted, which is highly unfair,” explained Mehta.
Mehta thanked the international medical community for their support and said this abeyance would never have come about if they had simply sat back and accepted the new rules without putting up a fight. The rules have received a lot of criticism from other non-Asians.
The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has expressed concern about the welfare of international medical graduates who have been adversely affected by the new laws. One doctor from Pakistan has already committed suicide and thousands of others are living in appalling conditions or suffering from stress due to being unemployed.
“The RCP urges the Department of Health and the Home Office to issue, as an urgent priority, unambiguous advice to remove the uncertainty which prevents international medical graduates from making informed decisions for their professional futures,” said a RCP statement.
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