Ramesh Mehta was born in 1947 in a village in central India.[1] From the age of seven, he aspired to become a doctor. Prior to immigrating to the United Kingdom in 1981, he undertook his undergraduate training at the Government Medical College and Hospital, Nagpur, where he completed his postgraduate paediatrics training. He then completed his higher specialist training in the UK, obtained Fellowship of the Royal College of Paediatrics & Child Health.
Clinical career
He was appointed consultant paediatrician at Bedford Hospital in 1993. He then became clinical director of the paediatric directorate and supported the design of the mother and baby unit. He developed children's rheumatology services, prior to joining as honorary consultant in paediatric rheumatology at Great Ormond Street Hospital. He was a tutor at the University of Cambridge and at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), of which he was its council member and a negotiator between the Indian Academy of Paediatrics and RCPCH.
Equality, diversity and inclusion
In 1996, he founded the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO). He led the BAPIO challenge against the British government’s April 2006 “guideline” to hospital trusts to employ non-EU doctors only if no candidate from the EU is available. This was affecting thousands of International Medical Graduates in NHS training posts. BAPIO won a landmark verdict against the British government when the country’s highest court ruled illegal a state guideline discriminating against overseas medical graduates for employment in state health services.[2][3]
He also led a BAPIO legal challenge against the Royal College of General Practitioners and the General Medical Council over the differential pass rates for BME trainees in the clinical skills assessment required to become a GP in the UK. However, a High Court judge ruled that the clinical skills assessment did not unlawfully discriminate against ethnic minority candidates. But Mr Justice Mitting said that the association had won “if not a legal victory, then a moral success” and called on the college to act over the disparity in success rates between white UK graduates and those from ethnic minorities who qualified in the UK or abroad.[4][5]
He has been working on eradicating differential attainment for doctors from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds and international medical graduates, who make up over a third of the UK medical doctors. He inspired the seminal work - Bridging the Gap in 2021, which produced 10 consensus recommendations for the tackling bias in the full spectrum of medical careers. He has worked on improving workforce recruitment and retention through his project on establishing the Dignity Charter for the NHS which was launched at the Royal College of Surgeons by Sir Stephen Powis in October 2022. As a champion of international medical graduates and locally employed doctors, Ramesh Mehta led the Charter for Locally Employed Doctors which was launched at the first ever conference for Locally Employed Doctors in the UK in summer of 2022.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, Mehta wrote to the UK home secretary requesting that international medical professionals be exempt from the Health and Care Worker visa, also known as the 'NHS visa'.[8] The following year, during the COVID-19 pandemic in India, he announced an online support plan by doctors of Indian origin living in the UK to help in remote towns and villages in India, including free online evaluations of X-Rays and CT scans. In addition they would raise funds for oxygen concentrators.[9]
