We heart IMS
Under new immigration rules, medical students from non-EEA countries will have to apply for a work permit after their first two years of postgraduate training. Permits will only be granted to non-EEA doctors if suitable EEA candidates cannot be found. This means that the majority of undergraduates from non-EEA countries, who came to study medicine in the UK with the belief that they could stay to complete their training, will have to leave.
We are concerned about the current cohort of international medical students (IMS) – those who started medicine before September 2006. These students were recruited with the implied promise that they could train in the UK. International medical students spend well over £100,000 on tuition fees to train here so it’s unfair that they’re sent back before they’ve finished their training – especially as the UK foundation programme is not recognised in many parts of the world while UK specialist training is. This means many IMS will be unable to compete with local graduates when they go home.
Asking for international medical students to be allowed to stay will not harm the job prospects of UK graduates – IMS who graduate from UK medical schools are accounted for in MMC projections so the argument that these people are taking home graduates’ jobs is false.
The We heart IMS campaign is a joint project of the five London medical school SUs to make the government recognise that the case of international medical students currently in UK medical schools is distinct from that of international medical graduates (doctors from abroad) and that it is unfair to penalise these people already in the system. We need as many people as possible to write to their MP so that we can present these concerns to the government. As we’re concerned only with the case of international medical students already in the system, this campaign is different from others which aimed to make the government overturn these new rules completely so don’t feel you needn’t take part in this campaign if you’ve already written to your MP previously! What would really help us is that if you have parents who live in another part of the country and you still live with them e.g. in the summer holidays, you use their address for the letter – this will mean getting more MPs involved in the campaign and strengthen our cause.
What we’d like you to do:
- Click here to visit writetothem (opens in new window).
- Type in your post code to find out the name of your MP (If possible, please use the address of your parents’ home – this means we can involve a wider number of MPs)
- Download this letter and enter the name of your MP, your name, and the address whose post code you used to find the MP’s name.
- Once you’ve entered all this information in, save the letter and email it to: ims@medical-student.co.uk, we’ll do the rest!
- All done, thanks for your support!
Promotional materials – feel free to print these if you’d like to futher our campaign!
- Poster 1 A3 size (2.75mb) A4 size (250kb)
- Poster 2 A3 size (2.92mb) A4 size (158kb)
- Letter to MPs (74kb)
