Doctors feel they are losing their professional status amid mounting checks on how they do their job, a medical leader has warned.

Dr Hamish Meldrum, new chairman of the British Medical Association, said growing paperwork and demands from middle managers to prove standards are being met is taking staff away from patients.

He spoke of colleagues working in an atmosphere where it is assumed all doctors are bad doctors who have not yet been found out.

He also warned against singling out foreign doctors for tougher checks following the failed car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow.

A number of doctors were arrested in the wake of the terrorist incidents, although some have now been released.

Dr Meldrum, who grew-up and studied in Edinburgh, was elected chairman of the BMA for the UK at the end of June.

One of the immediate problems he faced was the chaotic introduction of a new training regime for junior doctors - a system which was rolled out amid warnings of further problems in hospitals yesterday.

His reign also started during a shake-up of the way doctors are regulated following scandals such as the Harold Shipman murders, and days after he was elected doctors were at the centre of the Glasgow Airport terror investigation.

In his first major Scottish interview since taking office, Dr Meldrum said he hoped the "right lessons" were learned from the terror experience.

He described the circumstances as different from Shipman, a GP who murdered 250 patients, adding: "To suggest, as one or two suggest, that we need to particularly toughen up on the checking of people who want to be doctors who want to come from abroad, seems to me to be out of proportion.

"We need to toughen up on checks for all people who come from abroad."

He also said he had received reports that some foreign doctors had been "victimised" since the attacks, with some feeling hospitals were less keen to employ them.

"There certainly have been reports from middle eastern colleagues that they have felt quite nervous following what has happened in Glasgow. But in general terms I think I would say that most of the reporting has been reasonably responsible and most of the actions taken by politicians have been reasonably proportionate," he added.

However Dr Meldrum was more critical of the way that doctors are being checked up on a day-to-day basis.

He said: "I think all doctors feel there is an awful lot more bureaucracy and overwhelming power of management whether you are in general practice or hospital medicine. That is understandable in some ways in that you cannot live and work in a medical world where you are just left to get on with it. Equally there is a feeling we are almost being deprofessionalised.

"There is a lot of feeling among doctors that there's almost an assumption they're all bad doctors who have not been found out.

"Where as the vast majority are very good and do not think when they get up in the morning what can I do to harm patients today'. There are a small number who let down the profession."

He said that a balance had to be struck to ensure systems set up to detect people working below par did not deflect doctors from doing their main job - caring for patients.