Mu-Chun Chiang: Home Office backtracks on threat to deport NHS doctor

U-turn follows widespread media coverage of 27-year-old’s case

The Home Office has backtracked on a threat to deport an NHS junior doctor following media coverage of the case.

Mu-Chun Chiang, 27, who first came to the UK 22 years ago, was told she faced being deported or jailed after she made a small error in a visa application.

She told The Independent it had left her “panicked” and in a “state of shock”.

But following widespread coverage in the news media, the Home Office has now granted her leave to remain.

“Following reconsideration of this case in light of additional evidence supplied by Ms Chiang, we have now contacted her to confirm her leave to remain,” a spokeswoman said.

Dr Chiang, who works at Aintree University Hospital in Liverpool, moved to the UK in 2006 to study, having previously lived in Glasgow with her family from 1997 to 2002.

After her visa expired in June, her fresh application for a working visa was turned down because her bank balance had – briefly – dipped below a £945 limit imposed by the Home Office.

Despite appealing the decision by proving she had more than that figure in a separate savings account, she was rejected because the information had not been in her initial application.

Officials then wrote to her, saying she “must leave the UK now” or she “would be liable to be detained and removed”.

On Tuesday, Dr Chiang had told The Independent: “I was in a state of shock. I was very panicked; the letter itself is really threatening.

“Initially when I got the letter I really wanted to leave actually because I just felt it was so hostile and evidently they just want to drive me out the country. But all the support from strangers and the British public and people from the NHS has made me want to stay.”

Campaigners welcomed the U-turn. Rinesh Parmar, of the Doctors Association UK group, said the government should review its “senseless” hostile environment policy.

He said: “We are pleased to hear that the Home Office has seen sense and reconsidered their stance in Dr Chiang’s case. At a time when pressures in our NHS are ever-increasing the government’s senseless policies have the result of driving valuable qualified doctors out of the country.

“We are calling on the Home Office to review their actions in this case, learn from them and immediately put right the inadequacies of their systems which nearly deprived the patients Liverpool of a future GP.”