Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 5 July 2023 to Question 191982 on General Practitioners: Migrant Workers, when she plans to the four-month visa extension for newly trained international medical graduates to take effect.

We will be amending the immigration rules shortly to cater for International Medical Graduate GPs arriving from the Autumn so they can benefit from the four-month extension automatically. We are also working closely with the relevant UK health bodies and UK Visas and Immigration to ensure that this is as straight forward as possible for those already in country, and those due to complete their training this year.

In conjunction with these changes, we continue work to encourage more GP surgeries to become Home Office sponsors. This will allow surgeries to recruit international medical graduates more efficiently on completion of their training.