Published on April 24, 2006 at 7:48 AM
The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK appears to stagger from one crisis to another, and now hundreds of overseas doctors have staged a demonstration outside the Department of Health over a change in the immigration rules which will force many of them to leave the UK.
Shortages of doctors in previous years has meant Britain encouraged overseas doctors and nurses to train in the NHS, and currently as many as 15,000 doctors, mainly from the Indian subcontinent but also from Africa, are working in British hospitals while training to become specialists or are looking for jobs in order to do so.
Medical trainees work for up to seven years as junior doctors before qualifying as consultants or general practitioners.
But in March the government announced that any UK or EU applicant, even if not as well qualified, must have priority over doctors from elsewhere.
Every doctor from outside the EU wanting to work in the UK will need a work permit which they can only get from the hospital offering them a job after it has proven no applicant from the UK or the EU could fill the vacancy.
Presently the vast majority of overseas doctors training to get a specialist qualification take one six-month contract after another and without a job and the work permit that comes along with it, thousands of doctors will have to leave the UK.
Along with the U.S. Britain has recently been harshly criticised by the World Health Organisation for poaching foreign doctors and nurses from countries such as Africa adding to the chronic shortage of qualified medical staff there.
The government is being called upon to rethink the ruling as in many areas in the UK, services depend on foreign doctors.
There are currently than 117,000 doctors in the NHS, and medical schools are full with record numbers of new British doctors expected to enter the service in August.
That could mean as many as 15,000 overseas doctors will have little chance of qualifying as specialists or completing their training.