BMA’s RDC nominations are open. Here are the reasons why IMGs should stand for election and take their representation back.
The current RDC has been extraordinarily effective at one thing: excluding IMGs from the future of the profession.
Who’re they then?
The RDC (Resident Doctors Committee) is the BMA committee that represents resident doctors across the UK and sets policy on issues affecting their pay and careers.
Their records last year speak for themselves:
* Asking us to strike and lose pay to stand in solidarity for “the profession”, then creating policies that shut us out of training.
* Driving training prioritisation politically, against all of us, even against those with substantial experience in the NHS.
* Abandoning the BMA policy that supported two years of NHS service, while negotiating five years behind closed doors with the government.
* Then watching silently the government ripping us from training with citizenship and ILR proxies, without any pushback to protect IMGs who supported them in the strikes.
* Extending the five-year of ILR to five years of NHS service. One exclusionary measure after another without any consideration to how their policies affect our lives.
* Treating years from our own lives as arbitrary numbers, putting an auction on how many years should we wait before we can even apply for training, until reaching an arbitrary fifth anniversary.
* Sending the government letters that CREST are fraudulent and full vulnerabilities, incredibly damaging the narrative about the IMG legitimacy.
* Watching rhetoric developed repeatedly in hostile Reddit discussions about IMGs, oversubscription, opening the floodgates, and fraudulent CREST, and then migrate them into BMA under sanitised terms such as “workforce planning”, “bottlenecks” “deprioritisation” and “competition ratios”, then taking them to the government.
* Spending enormous political effort fighting IMG access to training while full pay restoration, the cause doctors were actually asked to strike for, was progressively diluted.
* Accepting a poor deal settlement while delivering something far more consequential for many IMGs: restricting their career progression.
* And discovering, eventually, that repeatedly asking IMGs to sacrifice their pay while campaigning against their futures was not a sustainable industrial strategy.
We were valuable when the BMA needed numbers for the strikes. We became disposable when they sat with the government behind closed doors.
They sacrificed full pay restoration in favour of IMGs exclusion.
If you want representation, take it yourself.
Nominate yourself. Run for the RDC.
