Doctors trained in India at four times higher risk of losing NHS job

The trend revealed that in the last five years, out of every 1000 doctors trained in Britain, only one was struck off the register. In contrast, I in 250 doctors trained from India and 1 in 350 doctors trained from Pakistan were struck off, the General Medical Council (GMC) statistics revealed. This makes Indian doctors four times more vulnerable to layoffs than their other UK or EU counterparts.

Between 2008 and 2013, a total number of 458 British doctors were barred from working of which a majority were from India, followed by Pakistan, Egypt and Nigeria, according to The Daily Telegraph which revealed the GMC findings.

The statistics come at a time when it is considered that as many as one in every three medical professionals working in the UK is from outside of Britain which brings overseas-trained doctors numbers to 95,000. Of this, a majority are Indian doctors.

A total number of 25,092 doctors practicing in the UK have been trained in India or 9.7% of UK medics

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The GMC stats are a result of a high court action brought by BAPIO (British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin) against the GMC. According to BAPIO’s charge, there is discrimination against overseas doctors who wanted to become GPs in the UK and said that Indian doctors are more likely to fail the assessment test.

The research found that ethnic minority graduates trained in the UK were more likely to fail the clinical skills assessment at their first attempt than their white UK colleagues.

Just last month, BAPIO reacting to a report published in the BMJ (British Medical Journal) which linked performance on the PLAB exams with both MRCP and MRCGP performance.

At that time, Dr Ramesh Mehta, the President of BAPIO said: “We must drive standards up, but we need objective evidence and fair processes. We have asked the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AoMRC) to work with us and start such a review. We may be Indian origin but we are foremost NHS doctors and want the NHS to be the best; this blame game is not helpful”.

Annual statistics from GMC point to a trend of declining numbers of Indian doctors coming to the UK since 2004.

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