GMC inquiry into foreign doctors

GMC was cleared of institutional racism

The General Medical Council is looking for reasons why it is more likely to discipline foreign-trained doctors than their UK-qualified peers.

Of the 54 struck off the medical register last year, 35 of them had trained abroad.

A report published in 2000 found no evidence to back accusations of institutional racism in the GMC.

The project will also examine how changes to all doctors' working lives impact on patients.

The NHS relies heavily on doctors trained in other countries - and the competence of those outside the EU is tested before they can register to work in the UK.

Last month Gordon Brown said that tighter checks would be made in the wake of terrorist charges against three overseas-trained doctors, but the GMC project is unrelated to this issue.

What we are doing is looking at where the issues might be GMC spokesman

The GMC spokeswoman conceded that overseas-trained doctors were "disproportionately represented" in its "fitness-to-practice" statistics, but said it was still not clear why this was.

"What we are doing is looking at where the issues might be," she said.

The studies would have a much wider scope than simply looking at the competence of doctors who came to the UK after training, she added.

"We regulate all doctors, not just overseas-trained doctors, and we are also looking at what happens when doctors who qualify in the UK move into their first clinical jobs in the UK, or when they are 'promoted' and take on extra responsibilities," she said.

The majority of the work will start in the autumn, and reports are expected in 2009.

Discrimination check

The last major report into the relationship between overseas doctors and the GMC was written by the Policy Studies Institute seven years ago, after years of complaints of that ethnic origin was a factor in the outcome of disciplinary procedures.

Its author, Isobel Allen, concluded that while racial and cultural differences might be a factor in the differences, there was no evidence of overt discrimination.

Current statistics reveal that while the proportion of complaints about overseas-trained doctors is in line with their UK counterparts, they are twice as likely to progress to a full disciplinary hearing.

The GMC spokesman said that one of the research projects, coordinated by the Economic and Social Research Council, aimed to allow closer examination of the statistics by improving how ethnicity was logged for every UK practising doctor.