The Home Office has overturned its refusal to issue a visa to the three-year old daughter of an NHS doctor after her fight was highlighted by the Guardian.
Amany Abdelmeguid came to the UK from Egypt in 2016 on a Tier 2 visa, sponsored by Health Education England as part of a drive to recruit junior doctors in the UK. At the same time, her husband – an anaesthetist – took a job in Saudi Arabia to get the training he needed to also work for the NHS.
The couple’s daughter, Layan – known as Lily – was left in Egypt with her paternal grandparents. At the time, the elderly couple were in good health. But the application took so long – the government guidance says 100% of applications from Cairo are processed in 15 days, but Abdelmeguid applied for Layan’s visa in July 2017 – that their health has now deteriorated to the point they can no longer look after their granddaughter.
Lily’s application was rejected on the grounds Abdelmeguid’s husband wasn’t in the UK at the time it was made, despite government guidelines which say that both of the applicant’s parents must be present unless there are “serious or compelling family or other considerations which would make it desirable not to refuse the application and suitable arrangements have been made in the UK for the applicant’s care”.
“I felt shocked when I got the email overturning the decision,” Abdelmeguid said. “I could not believe it. I think I am still in shock. I can’t believe that after all that time of waiting and hoping and fighting, she will actually be here with me.
But Abdelmeguid is angry that her family has been made to suffer by the Home Office. “I believe that this period of separation has affected Lily’s psychology in a bad way,” she said. “She was suddenly left without her dad and her mum. She felt abandoned and unwanted. She kept asking me every time I video-called her whether she could get on the plane and come to me. She would tell me, ‘you left me.’ It has been very hard on both of us. I was being constantly tortured.”
Believing her appeal would not be successful, Abdelmeguid had already planned to leave the UK and practice medicine in a different country.
“The decision to overturn Lily’s refusal has changed my plans drastically,” she said. “I was offered a job in a GP training program which I had decided to decline if she was not going to be with me. My husband and I had started already planning to travel to another country to practice medicine, perhaps Ireland or Australia, as we did not feel safe in the UK for long-term plans.”
The official statistics on Tier 2 visas granted to health and social work staff show the NHS is increasingly reliant on people like Abdelmeguid, with numbers increasing from 2,921 in 2010 to 5,287 in 2016.
But it appears they may be facing increasing difficulty in bringing their dependent children to live with them here. The number of children, partners and dependants granted the right to live in Britain has dropped by 73% in a decade.
Now, Abdelmeguid said, she can commit to the NHS. “I can progress in my career now and join the GP training program,” she said. Lily will start reception this September. Lily’s father, Dr Ahmed Ibrahim will join his family in December after he finishes his training as an anaesthetist in Saudi Arabia.
“I can’t wait to get Lily here,” said Abdelmeguid. “Her nursery kindly kept her place that I booked for her in November 2017. That’s how long I have been waiting. That’s how long Lily and I have been suffering.”
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