It is terrible that overseas doctors who are giving such a good service and are so clearly appreciated by the public are increasingly coming up before the General Medical Council (GMC) accused of being unfit to practise.

As an organisation which represents the interests of more than 30,000 doctors who work in the UK, we at the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin have been looking at the issue of increasing numbers of our colleagues who are being disciplined by the trusts or reported to GMC.

Are they much worse than locally trained doctors? Or is there discrimination at work, such that foreign doctors or those from ethnic backgrounds are being persecuted or at least not properly supported by their employers and colleagues?

As the foiled terrorist attacks on London and Glasgow have indicated, overseas-trained doctors can make headlines for all the wrong reasons. Some may have further question marks over their everyday conduct and are justly investigated on that basis.

But the doctors who commit the most horrendous crimes such as murder have, like Harold Shipman, tended to be white and trained in the UK. The previous tragic examples of these sorts of cases include hardly any doctors who trained overseas

We also find that the number of cases reported to the GMC which involve overseas doctors come not from patients but mainly from professional sources, often within the NHS.

To be fair to the Government, they have themselves accepted that there is institutional racism within the health service. The Department of Health appointed its own director for equality and human rights some years ago, but they have been unable to bring about any significant changes at the ground level of wards and surgeries.

We are extremely worried that there is a broad climate of discrimination in terms of hospital and primary care trust management, many of whom appear to take it for granted that overseas-trained doctors are somehow inferior and not up to the job.

Doctors are human, and anyone is capable of making mistakes, however unfortunate. But even the slightest of problems with an overseas doctors’ practise - the merest misinterpretation or cultural difference - might snowball into an accumulation of suspicions and complaints, which is all the more likely to be considered serious by the GMC.

If the cases are taken further, you then have to ask who is examining them. By the GMC’s own admission, most of their panels to adjudicate or screen cases prior to fitness-to-practise hearings are composed of white doctors or lay members. Over the last few years they have been working to rectify the situation, but we believe panels with greater ethic minority representation will lead to fairer outcomes from complaints.

The pledge from the GMC to investigate these processes is welcome, but it is long overdue.

Dr Ramesh Mehta is President of the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, which represents doctors from the Indian sub-continent in the UK.

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