Good news for international medical graduates

The Health secretary at the time, Patricia Hewitt had requested that international medical graduates should only be considered for training positions if domestic graduates were not available.  This was immediately picked up by the British Associations of Indian Origins resulted in the case being referred to the house of Lords.

The Lords have now ruled international medical graduates cannot be discriminated against with far reaching implications.  Firstly, it means that the positions of some 8000 medical graduates already in the UK are now secure.  It also means that many domestic medical graduates will find it much harder to find training positions as they will be competing against several where previously there had bee a shortage of medical graduates.

The UK will no reduce it's highly skilled migrant program which will reduce the numbers of international graduates entering the UK.  However, these changes will be filtered in gradually over the next couple of years.