Pre-entry screening of foreign doctors wanted

Press, 15 June 1989, Page 23

Pre-entry screening of foreign doctors wanted

Palmerston North Overseas trained junior doctors should be screened before they reach New Zealand, not given a test once they are here, the Medical Superintendents’ Association says.

The association’s president, Dr Tony Poynter, who is the Palmerston North Area Health Board’s chief medical officer, said while overseas doctors were needed by hospitals, they should be tested overseas so people “patently unsuitable” didn’t come halfway across the world.

Once an overseastrained doctor had obtained an entry permit

and arrived it left hospital boards in a quandary if they were found unsuitable. It could take several months to replace them. “The answer is to vet people before they come.” Dr Poynter said New Zealand made extensive use of overseas-trained junior doctors because of the imbalance between the number of New Zea-land-trained specialists needed for the country in the future and the number of junior doctors needed in the hospitals. Even more junior doctors were needed after a change in rostering systems several years ago. But Dr Poynter said his own personal opinion was

New Zealand should look more to its own resources for running the hospitals. “For a number of years I have been concerned about recruiting extensively overseas.” Taking people from other countries, and often completely different cultures, was obviously going to lead to some problems. "In a sense we are dealing with a problem we could have predicted,” “I don’t believe the answer is to import people —- in the long run, we should be looking at perhaps using a different mix of New Zealand doctors in hospitals,” he said.