Low pass rate for foreign doctors

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

Almost half the foreign doctors who completed a $15 million Government retraining programme to work in New Zealand have failed their final exam.

And a third of those who did pass are still without medical jobs.

The Government started the multimillion-dollar bridging programme in 2001 to help many of the hundreds of overseas-trained doctors whom the council could not register.

They had come to New Zealand in the 1990s without being told they must pass a council registration exam to practise medicine.

The programme of eight 11-month intakes will finish in 2005.

Four in 10 doctors now working in New Zealand received their primary medical training overseas.

The Clinical Training Agency said that of the 141 doctors from the first five intakes who sat the exam after completing the course, 78 passed.

And from the first three intakes, 49 were in medical jobs.

Despite the bridging programme's statistics, Medical Council chief executive Sue Ineson and Health Minister Annette King are satisfied with it.

Mrs Ineson said yesterday: "It has solved what was a real big difficulty at the time. Some felt they had been misled; to right that injustice was the right thing to do."

She thought the exam pass rate of bridging-programme doctors was lower because many had been in New Zealand and out of medicine for a decade.

The flip-side was that they were more in tune with local culture than newer arrivals, so tended to settle into hospital work more quickly.

Ms King said the Government and the council were now discussing setting up a new course. It would assist overseas-trained doctors to get jobs by helping them adapt to NZ culture and hospital systems.

Mrs Ineson said reasons for the low job rate, which was slowly improving, were:

* Reluctance of some hospitals to employ overseas-trained doctors who registered by passing the exam, because of problems experienced with such people in the past.

* Some bridging-programme graduates not wanting to leave Auckland.

* Fewer New Zealand-trained doctors than previously going abroad to work in their first two post-graduate years.

* The council's relaxation of registration rules for some overseas-trained doctors, mainly those from English-speaking countries.

She said the problems hospitals cited included difficulties communicating in English (which was why the council had tightened rules on this), failure to appreciate Treaty of Waitangi issues, and inappropriate attitudes to women.

"In New Zealand, women tend to want to be totally in charge of their own health.

"In some areas of the world, women aren't given the same status as in New Zealand."

The Overseas Doctors Association's previous president, Dr Indraka Fernando, is thankful for the programme, which has led to his landing a house surgeon job at Dunedin Hospital.

Before the bridging programme was created, he studied in these areas at Auckland University - and did some overseas health management consultancy work - after coming to New Zealand with his family in 1996.