Of more than 20,000 EU doctors registered to practice in this country, 4,061 have arrived since safety checks were removed five years ago.
The figure comes amid increasing concerns about the lack of scrutiny of medics who migrate to this country.
Figures from the General Medical Register show that among the foreign doctors registered to work in the UK, more than 5,000 are from former Eastern bloc countries.
Of those, the greatest exporter was Poland, which trained 1,800 medics now on the British register, followed by Hungary, which sent more than 1,000. More than 700 came from the Czech Republic and almost 800 from Romania.
Under an EU directive passed in 2004, doctors who qualify in any EU state can move to work in any other member state without tests of their language skills or clinical competence - even though experts last night warned that there is little consistency in the medical training, treatments and medications used across Europe.
Read more at The Telegraph.
Tags: Locums, Overseas recruitment, Patient safety
