There can be no better illustration of the lack of foresight and planning, silo mentality and absence of urgency of the current administration, than the plight of unemployed foreign qualified doctors. Add in grandstanding and attention seeking by politicians, and the inability or unwillingness by a myriad of entities staffed by fat cat bureaucrats, and you have a perfect storm.
This state of affairs in a sector that is constantly suffering from a lack of capacity is nothing but astounding.
To provide some context, the 13 medical schools in the country currently produce around 1000 doctors a year, with this number being fairly stagnant, due to the cost and time it takes to set up new training facilities. Around 10 years ago, the idea was mooted to train students abroad, with Cuba being chosen as the main overseas centre.
It would appear that a fair bit of groundwork was done by the respective national departments and ministers before and during the project regarding alignment of curricula and certification processes after the graduates had returned home. This ensured a modicum of organisation and process in their integration into the SA health system after qualification.
Since then, the floodgates have opened in terms of provinces, and even the larger metros like Durban and Johannesburg awarding bursaries to students to study medicine in any country willing to have them. Hence we have had former Free State strongman and Premier Ace Magashule sending students to Turkey (many of whom were forced to return due to unpaid fees and rent), with others placed in Russia, China and Italy.
Earlier this month over 250 foreign trained doctors marched to the Union Buildings and the offices of the Health Professions Council of SA’s (HPCSA) offices to highlight their plights, with some having returned home more than three years ago. Lamented the one … ‘Taxpayers’ money was used to pay for our studies. We spent six years studying abroad, and now our hands are chopped because we can’t serve.’. Said another, echoing my point on the Cuban trained doctors above … ‘…we want equal treatment, similar to that of the doctors who studied medicine in South Africa or Cuba.’
What I absolutely fail to understand, is, as this trend of sending medical students abroad accelerated, where were the South African Medical Association (SAMA), HPCSA, and National Department of Health (DOH)? Surely it was incumbent on them to align their processes and regulations to ensure that these graduates were able to be fast tracked into the health system. Instead we have the HPCSA making graduates wait for up to three years before writing their Board exams. One would have thought that the prospect of injecting 250 doctors into a system crying out for capacity would have been incentive enough to light a fire under them.
Vijay Naidoo is the CEO of the Port Shepstone Business Forum. He writes in his personal capacity. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.
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