Racism and the medical elite

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From:

MBBS (Lond), FRCS (Edin), FICS.

I am a certified and highly qualified surgeon now living in Harpenden. I have been persistently discriminated against on account of my race, and finally been refused employment. I am currently holding the post of General Practitioner Trainee, in a perfectly ludicrous situation, akin to that of a Queen's Counsel who, for political reasons is obliged, late in lite, to go back and become a solicitor's clerk.

Ponnampalam, FRCS (Eng), FRCS (Can), Rate of pay The DHSS has refused to pay me at the rate I am entitled to, and again has refused to give the reasons for their decision.

It is my impression that the Medical Establishment, despite their protestations to the contrary, are not prepared to accept a black who is not also content to play the stereotype. A study over the years of the system for appointing permanent staff to the medical side of the NHS leads one to the following conclusions: 1. Coloured doctors do get appointed to the permanent grades in the NHS, generally in the less popular specialities and by a process of downward drifting and retro-evolution. 2. A system of token integration, patronage, and token appointments operates, leading sometimes to the situation where an unqualified, but acceptable stereotype coloured person is appointed. 3. Finally, the medical hierarchy is not prepared to accept full integration within the tant General Surgeon in a Teaching Hospital in this country, I was made only too aware of the opinions of my fellow Consultants who often simply did not bother to conceal blatantly racist views regarding • coloured persons, be they doctors or patients. In fact, I have heard such views expressed at College Dinners, and by Royal College Presidents, no less.

Goldmine

The privatisation of Medicine makes a Senior (i.e. Consultant) post in the NS a virtual " goldmine to those intent on bcommercialising medicine and the closely knit Drenhlinbmnnt aus datorminart ip end, the treatment meted htry: is d of the blackest and most disgraceful episodes in the history of Medicine. For several years after the war, doctors from the Indian Subcontinent were the workhorses of the NHS, especially in District Hospitals, and in the Midlands and the North.

Their standards were often criticised as they worked hard and long and largely unsupervised, in order that their Consultants could sleep undisturbed at night and have time for golfing, yachting, and private patients, not necessarily in that order.

Yours sincerely, Mark Ponnampalam.

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profession.. Whilst work- ing as a temporary Consul-