London, February 25
Apparently bowing to pressure from groups campaigning for aggrieved Indian doctors, the UK has given the medicos some relief by agreeing to keep in abeyance new immigration rules that went against them for the first round of recruitment to the national health service (NHS).

The guidelines issued by the Health Department on its website for recruitment to training posts said: “Doctors with limited leave to enter/remain in the UK in immigration categories that allow them to work will be considered for short-listing in round I if their leave is current at August 1.” From January 22 to February 4, more than 30,000 doctors applied for the 21,000 jobs with the NHS, the biggest employer of medicos, and about 12,000 applicants are Indians.

A shortlist of candidates will be released tomorrow and interviews will take place in the first week of March.

Since the highly skilled migrant programme was announced in April, 2006, under which employers have to prove that they had no appropriate candidates from the UK and the EU before offering jobs to non-EU candidates, an estimated 5,000 Indian doctors have returned home as their prospects of getting a job here have diminished.

The British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (Bapio), one of the two petitioners seeking a judicial review of the immigration guidelines applicable to non-EU doctors, today welcomed the latest decision of the Health Department.

Bapio had written to the department, asking it to continue to keep the new “discriminatory” rules in abeyance as it was appealing the High Court’s February 9 ruling whereby it refused to quash the immigration regulations.

“We have already instructed our solicitors to start the process of appeal,” Bapio said, adding “we are happy that the Department of Health has responded sensibly. We expect that all doctors will be treated equally and on merit rather than on nationality. This is in the best interests of the British people who deserve the best doctors.

We will continue to work to eradicate discrimination in any form,” Bapio president Ramesh Mehta said.

Mehta said they planned to raise £100,000 for filing the appeal out of which £75,000 had already been collected.

Vice-chair for policy for Bapio Raman Lakshman claimed it would not have happened if the international medical graduate community had quietly accepted the new rules when they were announced in March, 2006. He said the “U-turn by the Department of Health is due to the sustained campaign of Bapio supported by thousands of international medical graduates”.

Lakshman said, “While we do believe this is a step in the right direction... we fear that the inclusion of a clause regarding visa status on August 1 will cause much confusion and anxiety and we will be taking this up with our solicitors on Monday”.

Meanwhile, the Royal College of Physicians has expressed concern over the welfare of international medical graduates who have been adversely affected by the new immigration rules announced in March last year. — PTI