Indian doctors less likely to be promoted to senior hospital jobs in UK: Study

London: Doctors from Indian and other ethnic minority communities in Britain are less likely to be promoted to senior hospital jobs, a latest medical investigation found. [caption id=“attachment_1138309” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. PTI[/caption] The ‘BMJ Careers’ journal found that in 2012, 13.8 percent of white applicants to senior hospital doctor jobs in  England were successful in securing the role they applied for, compared with just 4.8 per cent of doctors from ethnic minority backgrounds. Black doctors were the least likely to secure consultant, specialist or other senior doctor roles, with a success rate of only 2.7 per cent. Asian and British Asian doctors had a mildly better ratio at 5.72 per cent, with a total of 2,514 appointed last year. Indian-origin doctors have long been seen as the back-bone of the NHS with over 25,000 practicing in the UK. But concerns around discrimination within the country’s health service had recently forced the General Medical Council (GMC),the doctor’s watchdog in the UK, to investigate. Another paper, also published by the ‘British Medical Journal’, found that ethnic minority doctors were much more likely to fail the exam required to practice as a general practitioner (GP). The researchers said they “cannot exclude subjective bias owing to racial discrimination in the marking of the clinical skills assessment” as a reason for the discrepancy. The paper follows a GMC review of the exam, which is run by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), following concerns about failure rates among doctors who qualified outside the UK, as well as among UK-trained doctors from black or other ethnic minority backgrounds. In his report for the GMC, Aneez Esmail, professor of general practice at the University of Manchester, said more needed to be done to acknowledge that candidates trained overseas may require more training and support. Ethnic minority GP candidates trained in the UK were four times more likely to fail than their white UK-trained colleagues at the first attempt, but these differences disappeared at the second attempt, Esmail found. According to RCGP figures, the failure rate for British medical graduates of South Asian origin is 17.5 per cent and for a black candidate 24.4 per cent, compared with 5.8 per cent for a white candidate. The British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO), which represents Indian-origin doctors working in the UK, has been campaigning for a probe into the disparity in results for over two years ago. “We want fairness and equal treatment for the IMG (international medical graduate) trainees. For the qualifying bodies, it should be an extremely worrying point if a large number of trainees from a particular background are failing, despite most successfully completing three years in training under supervision and actually servicing live patients,” said BAPIO president Ramesh Mehta, himself an examiner in the UK. The RCGP has denied allegations of bias and welcomed the review. It plans to conduct in-depth research into the examination. PTI