PTI - Friday, 11-50 pm 
 
London, Apr 21: Hundreds of overseas doctors, most of them from India, today held a demonstration outside the UK Department of Health in London to protest new immigration rules forcing them to leave Britain.

Holding placards saying Death of Merit, International Medical Graduates are not Doormats and Betrayal of Commonwealth Doctors, the non-EU doctors urged the British Government to withdraw the new immigration rules, describing them as "unfair, unjust and discriminatory".

New immigration regulations announced last month mean doctors from outside the European Union will no longer be able to train in Britain without a work permit, a change which could hit up to 20,000 medical practitioners.

Around 70 per cent of those affected come from the Indian subcontinent, a traditional recruiting ground for Britain’s state-funded National Health Service (NHS).

Addressing the protesting doctors right across 10, Downing Street, Ramesh Mehta, President of the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, said "the new rule is unfair and unjust, and leads to discrimination against doctors who have been the backbone of the NHS since its inception."

Mehta said they had met the Minister of State for Immigration Tony McNulty a couple of days ago on the issue and he was sympathetic o their views.

After an hour-long peaceful demonstration, the doctors submitted a memorandum to the Department of Health urging withdrawal of the new rules and then marched up to the Trafalgar Square.

Mehta said between 15,000 to 20,000 doctors, most of them from India would be affected by the new laws. "We have already met the British Home Office Minister and the Indian High Commissioner Kamalesh Mehta and they are sympathetic to our cause. We are trying to meet minister in charge of the Department of Health."

Medical trainees work for up to seven years as junior doctors before qualifying as consultants or general practitioners. Shortages of doctors in the past meant Britain encouraged overseas medics to train in the NHS, but a rise in the number of home-trained medical students has increased competition for suitable training jobs.

Mehta said 15,000 of those affected by the change were in the middle of their training. "Many of them have children in school, many have bought houses. Suddenly, everything is gone."

Under the new rules, hospitals hiring trainee doctors now have to give priority to applicants from the UK and other European Union countries. Junior doctors from other countries will only get work permits if it can be shown they have specialist skills unavailable elsewhere.

Health Minister Lord Warner earlier told BBC "We’ve been told for some time that we should be more self-sufficient in doctors and not suck in doctors from overseas. There’s been a 70 per cent increase in the number of medical school intakes over the last seven or eight years. We have to ensure there are postgraduate specialist training posts for our own UK graduates."