LONDON, NOVEMBER 10, 2004
AFP

"Don't come here! It's a trap!" warns Sanjay Teotia, an Indian doctor whose dream of travelling to Britain for better training and higher income has become a nightmare.

"Everyone who lands up in the United Kingdom regrets within a week that he has come here," said 30-year-old Teotia, who has a post-graduate qualification in general medicine from Bangalore.

"It's now five months after I passed my exam and I have filled at least 400 applications, and there is not a single shortlisting for an interview for me," he told AFP .

Pulled by a tempting trainee salary of 22,000 pounds (31,500 euros, 40,500 dollars), about 10 times the average they could expect back home, as many as 30 percent of India's medical graduates every year opt to come to Britain.

On arrival, they must take the second part of the Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board (PLAB) exam which costs 430 pounds. The 135-pound first part will already have been taken and passed back home.

The PLAB secures registration with the General Medical Council (GMC), step one to becoming a trainee doctor in Britain's state-run, free-care-for-all National Health Service (NHS).

Sanjay ended up in East Ham, one of east London's poorest districts, where the burgeoning demand for PLAB cramming courses has led to an influx of up to 500 so-called "plabbers" a month.

It was a pathetic situation in most of the houses where PLAB doctors stayed, 10-12 doctors apart from the landlords paying 200 pounds-a-month for one room," he said. "Now I realise that it was far better in India.

"Real trouble looms post-PLAB when doctors find themselves caught in a vicious circle, desperate for experience and unable to get it. Faced with year-long waiting lists in some hospitals, trainees fork out hundreds of pounds to shadow a consultant, hoping that he may one day become their all-important local referee.

Sandip Mandal, a 32-year-old postgraduate in medicine from Calcutta, arrived in Britain in December 2003 and passed his PLAB the following month. He is still searching for work almost a year later.

"When I was in India my impression was that after passing PLAB I'll get a clinical attachment very soon and I'll get a job within three to four months and maximum six months," he told AFP .

"After August I got three interviews in different facilities, but I was not selected," he said. "I feel that to get an interview is basically a lottery, because for one post it is chosen from six or seven hundred people.

"Like Teotia, Mandal's advice to those back home thinking of making the trip is not to bother. "Don't come here to suffer. I have been here for about 11 months without any job and I have spent lots of pounds here which I haven't in India," he said.

"I can't go back to India because I have borrowed so much money from my friends. I can't give back that money if I don't earn some income in the United Kingdom."

Anand Kulkarni, an Indian-born consultant anaesthetist at Tameside General Hospital in Ashton Under Lyne, northwest England, told AFP the problem is getting worse and worse. "Nothing has been done," he said. "Basically, the number of people taking PLAB has gone up."

"There is a misconception back home that the UK is in need of doctors and that there is a big shortage of doctors," he said.

"I think a wrong message has reached Indian doctors that the UK is very desperate for doctors which is not really true."

Everyone, including the General Medical Council, seems to agree that the opportunities in Britain are at consultant level, not at the junior level, but somehow that message is not getting across to where it has to.

"The solution is that either the GMC should cut down the number of people taking PLAB or the government should guarantee a job once they pass the PLAB," Kulkarni said.

Despite the financial and emotional struggle, Kulkarni does not write off the decision to come to Britain. "In my opinion the NHS is a very fair system," he said.

"Once they get on to a training post, I have seen most of them progressing very well through the system and have been successful in their exams and in their careers and most of them have become consultants themselves."

At the end of September, 2003, over 13,000, or 16.8 percent of Britain's medical and dental staff were of Indian origin, according to official figures.

The General Medical Council told AFP it was bringing in concessions in February next year to try and make it cheaper for foreign students taking the PLAB in Britain.