Ramesh Mehta (physician)
Ramesh Mehta OBE is an Indian paediatrician at Bedford Hospital, and president of the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO), in the United Kingdom. Biography. Ramesh Mehta was born in 1947 in a village in central India. 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. Following additional training in the UK, he was appointed consultant paediatrician at Bedford Hospital in 1993. Three years  later he 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. In 1996, he founded the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO), and was its president in 2015, when BAPIO lost the  landmark case against the Royal College of General Practitioners, a judgement that Judge Justice Mitting called a ‘moral victory’. He is secretary general of the Global Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (GAPIO). 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'. 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.