Red tape strangling foreign doctors

South Africa faces a dire shortage of doctors. There are 12 000 vacancies for doctors in the public service. This means that on average, every hospital in the country is short of 40 doctors. Some hospitals have no doctors at all. Yet the Foreign Workforce Management Programme (FWMP) in the National Department of Health is taking up to a year to provide endorsement letters to foreign-qualified nationals, which doctors need to have before they can proceed with the steps required to work in South Africa.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) calls on the Minister of Health to announce a plan of action to improve the performance of this unit in doing what should be a very simple procedure.

The endorsement letter from the department of health is simply an acknowledgement that a doctor's qualification certificate from his or her home country is valid. It requires a simple enquiry with the professional council in the doctor's home country. Yet this is taking six months to a year, when it should take a week at most.

Phone calls to the FWMP are seldom answered. There was previously a phone at the entrance of the Pretoria building in which the FWMP is located, allowing people trying to contact the unit personally to call up and have someone come to escort them up. The phone has now been removed and no one is allowed to go to their offices. The letter is sent to you by mail, and you may not collect it physically.

This delay is a large problem for doctors, who need to earn their living while they wait, and cannot work in the profession they are trained for. It also causes further problems down the line. The letter is only valid for six months. Doctors need to do an oral and a written exam, which can only be done at certain times. If the endorsement letter validity period runs out between the first and the second exam, a new certificate has to be applied for and the first exam redone - at a cost of R3 000 per exam.

Where people are dying simply because there are not enough doctors to care for them, it is astonishing that problems are being allowed to impede the admission of new doctors into the country - doctors who have cost the public purse nothing to train and who are ready and willing to work in the public sector.   

Statement issued by Mike Waters, MP, Democratic Alliance shadow minister of health, October 19 2009

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