Tough “hostile environment” immigration rules are deepening the NHS staffing crisis by stopping well-qualified family doctors from working the UK, the profession’s leaders have warned.
The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) has pleaded with Sajid Javid, the home secretary, to help relieve the UK’s “desperate” lack of family doctors by putting them on the migration advisory committee’s shortage occupation list, in order to make it easier to recruit GPs from abroad.
Its appeal comes after Javid confirmed on Sunday that the monthly cap on numbers of skilled workers that can come and work in Britain was being reviewed, prompting speculation that the government will soon announce a relaxing of the policy.
Some health professionals including nurses, paramedics, old age psychiatrists and radiographers, are already on the shortage occupation list because they are in such short supply in the UK.
In her letter, Prof Helen Stokes-Lampard, the chair of the RCGP, warns Javid that an overhaul is urgently needed as efforts to fulfil the government’s pledge to increase the number of GPs in England by 5,000 by 2020 look set to fail, with numbers falling rather than rising.
“Clear targets to increase recruitment to general practice have been set out in NHS England’s General Practice Forward View, but these look increasingly difficult to achieve,” writes Stokes-Lampard.
She highlights the case of Dr Luke Ong, the GP trainee in Manchester whose threatened deportation in March was halted after an outcry forced the Home Office to rethink. His treatment will deter other non-EEA family doctors from making a career in the UK just when NHS leaders are trying to persuade more to come, she adds.
“This was an alarming example of the ‘hostile environment’ putting policy over common sense, and it is making it difficult for us to recruit GPs from overseas. Clearly, it is not in the public interest to deport a doctor who this country has heavily invested in and we are worried about the impact of such high-profile cases on those who study medicine here, and those who want to study here, who we need to choose careers in UK general practice,” she says.
She cites the case of two other doctors being prevented from joining the NHS because of the visa cap system, which the health and social care secretary Jeremy Hunt has made clear he wants to see reformed to allow in more staff. The cap has prevented 1,500 mainly hospital doctors from entering Britain since December, prompting one NHS trust boss to declare the system “bonkers”. NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens has also called for an overhaul.
The first is a Canadian man who is coming to the end of his GP training in Manchester. “His Tier 2 visa will expire at the end of his training, but whilst he wants to practise in the NHS, he is struggling to apply for a job that is able to sponsor him, as GP practices face barriers to offering Tier 2 sponsorship,” Stokes-Lampard said.
The second is a Syrian medical student from Aleppo who will soon complete his family medicine training in Beirut. “He has passed the necessary language qualifications and taken the GP training ranking exam, in which he did very well, and has been offered a training post in the UK. But he was denied a visa by the Home Office because GPs are not on the shortage occupation list.”
GP services are doubly disadvantaged by the visa cap system because surgeries have to pay about £2,000 to sponsor a non-EEA doctor they wish to recruit.
