{"id":3214,"date":"2012-04-17T12:16:38","date_gmt":"2012-04-17T04:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/?p=3214"},"modified":"2022-11-17T17:19:07","modified_gmt":"2022-11-17T09:19:07","slug":"overseas-doctors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/2012\/04\/overseas-doctors\/","title":{"rendered":"Overseas Physicians Best Medicine for Doctors\u2019s Shortage?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Local doctors oppose scheme to make it easier to recruit overseas doctors
\nReporters: Sabrina Poh & Viola Yeh<\/strong><\/p>\n

She starts her work day at 9 a.m., spending the morning checking up on and chit-chatting with patients on her ward rounds. Then she has a working lunch or talks to her supervisor at noon. In the afternoon, she has to rush to fit in more patients. Technically, she finishes work at 5 p.m., but she rarely gets to wrap up her work before 7 p.m. When she is assigned to be on-call, which usually happens one to two times per week, she needs to stick around until 1 a.m. the next day. By the time she gets home, she is exhausted; she eats, talks a little to her family and goes to bed.<\/p>\n

Dr Vinci Ma, who is in her early 30s, studied and practised medicine in the United Kingdom (UK). She returned to Hong Kong to be with her family. As a result, she has had to adapt to the long working hours and frenetic pace of Hong Kong\u2019s public hospitals. Here, she works 60 to 70 hours per week, compared to 48 hours in the UK.<\/p>\n

Ma has been working in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital since 2009. Like other doctors who qualified outside of Hong Kong, she had to sit a re-qualification exam and jump through other hurdles to be granted a partial licence. \u201cWe can only practise under limited registration, which means we are restricted to working in public hospitals, in a specific department under a contract,\u201d Ma explains.<\/p>\n

Ma earned her medical degree from the University of Nottingham and worked in the UK as a pediatrician for three years before coming back to Hong Kong.<\/p>\n

She spent half a year to prepare for the licensing exam set by the Medical Council of Hong Kong (MCHK). \u201cThere aren\u2019t any [sample] exam materials. There is a syllabus but it is not very helpful,\u201d she recalls. As a result, Ma had to go through all the materials she studied while at medical school.<\/p>\n

She passed the examinations, which have long been criticised as difficult by other overseas-qualified doctors, on her first try. However, she still had to repeat half of her basic training before she could practise.
\n<\/p>\n

One of her colleagues had to repeat his entire training and the intermediate exam, all of which he had already completed in the UK. The intermediate exam is a stepping stone towards become a specialist in a specific field of medicine.<\/p>\n

If Ma had waited a few years before returning to Hong Kong to practise medicine, things would be different. Earlier this year, the MCHK gave the go-ahead for the Hospital Authority (HA) to hire nine overseas doctors to work in public hospitals without first taking the MCHK\u2019s usual licensing examination and one year internship. The HA says all of the nine were born in Hong Kong but educated and trained overseas.<\/p>\n

Their employment is part of the HA\u2019s New Overseas Doctor Recruitment Scheme aimed at addressing the shortage of doctors in Hong Kong\u2019s public hospitals. Under the scheme, a panel of experienced doctors and professors from local medical schools will vet overseas applicants. Overseas-qualified doctors with at least three years\u2019 experience can apply.
\nIn 2011, the HA needed to recruit 500 doctors to develop new services and to replace the 300 who left to work in the private sector. The ever-expanding private sector offers doctors higher pay and a lighter workload. But the HA was only able to hire 330 doctors due to a lack of qualified local recruits. Hong Kong\u2019s medical schools produce just 260 graduates each year.<\/p>\n

But the idea of recruiting more overseas doctors has drawn criticism from local doctors\u2019 groups such as the Hong Kong Medical Association (HKMA), the Association of Private Medical Specialists of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Public Doctors\u2019 Association. These critics say that bringing in overseas-qualified doctors, especially without requiring them to take the licensing exam, will affect the quality of service.<\/p>\n

In a statement in response to the scheme, the Allied Concern Group on the Standard of Medical Services in Hong Kong wrote: \u201cWho will evade an examination to get a job?…The doctor we are looking for cannot be the one who evades challenges as benign as an examination.\u201d
\n<\/p>\n

Dr Choi Kin, the president of HKMA and member of the Medical Council, says the licensing exam is supposed to be on a par with the final Bachelor of Medicine exam of both the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and University of Hong Kong to ensure all overseas doctors meet a basic standard to safeguard the health care of the public.<\/p>\n

Choi is strongly opposed to the employment of the nine overseas-qualified doctors who avoided the licensing examination. He points to licensing examinations and other hurdles other countries, such as the United States and Canada, set before they will allow overseas-qualified doctors to practise there.<\/p>\n

Choi believes the hiring of overseas-qualified doctors in general will have a detrimental effect on the health of local citizens. He gives a hypothetical example of a young medical graduate from Ireland who has only worked as a radiation oncology doctor being thrown into the Accident and Emergency Department of Tseung Kwan O Hospital.
\n\u201cBlunders are bound to be made. I only hope life will not be lost,\u201d he says. \u201cLocal doctors do not want to babysit these foreign graduates for their mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Choi also disputes the HA\u2019s statement that the nine recruits are all locally-born Cantonese speakers. The HA does not want to disclose the identity of the doctors concerned for reasons of privacy and the sensitivity of the issue.
\nNot all concerned parties are critical of the scheme, however. The Hong Kong Patients\u2019 Rights Association told Varsity it felt the HA\u2019s \u201cstringent and lengthy employment procedure can safeguard the public patients\u2019 interest\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, UK-trained Vinci Ma feels the new arrangements do not go far enough and are still unfair to overseas doctors. \u201cTraining needs to get accredited,\u201d she says. \u201c[The MCHK] does not recognise all the training in the UK.\u201d
\nWhen Hong Kong was under British rule, there was a reciprocal arrangement under which doctors from the British Commonwealth were allowed to get registered and practise here. The rule was abolished upon the handover.<\/p>\n

Professor Enders Ng Kwok-wai, associate dean (development) of the Faculty of Medicine at CUHK, gives a conditional view on whether recruiting overseas doctors can help alleviate the heavy workload in public hospitals.<\/p>\n

Ng says that bringing in specialists could be beneficial as they could help train Hong Kong\u2019s younger doctors. In contrast, junior doctors coming from overseas would dilute existing training opportunities for local doctors.
\n\u201cThey become a burden to our system because we have to provide training for them and they would also take away the training opportunities of our local medical graduates,\u201d he says.
\nRegardless of the types of overseas doctors brought in, Ng believes they should all have to take the exams. \u201cWe have to make sure that the quality and the standard of the overseas doctors meets the local standards,\u201d he says. \u201cWe know very well that the standards of medical schools from around the world are not equal. We need to make sure the qualities of these overseas doctors are good enough to serve the local population.\u201d
\n<\/p>\n

Professor Tony Mok Shu-kam specialises in clinical oncology at CUHK and is a well-known television doctor who was trained in Canada. He worked there before returning to work in Hong Kong under limited registration. He says the recruitment of overseas-qualified doctors will only be of minimal help to the problem of the shortage of doctors in Hong Kong\u2019s public hospitals. \u201cThe demand is always there,\u201d says Mok who believes the shortage is due to the government\u2019s failure in long-term planning.<\/p>\n

He explains the government reduced the number of medical students during the economic decline in the early 2000s. \u201cWhen you cut back on the number of medical students, five years later, the flow of younger doctors into the public system starts to decrease. And we see the shortage of doctors these years.\u201d
\nHong Kong\u2019s two medical schools intend to increase the number of graduates from 260 to 320, but that will not boost the number of graduates till 2015.<\/p>\n

As a recent graduate from CUHK\u2019s medical school, 24-year-old Dr Will Leung Lok-hang is positive about the recruitment of overseas-qualified doctors. Leung, who is now a fully registered medical practitioner working at the Caritas Medical Centre says: \u201cI welcome them coming, if they come and do good to patients, because we all should put the patients\u2019 benefit first.\u201d
\nSetting aside the rising tensions between those who support the Overseas Doctor Recruitment Scheme and those who oppose it, Leung says the fundamental value of a good doctor lies in their attitude. \u201cHe should be collaborative, cooperative, of good character and listen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless of where they have been trained, Leung believes that, \u201cto be a good doctor, you should not just have a cure, but to comfort always. We have this kind of mission.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Plans to allow overseas-qualified doctors to work in Hong Kong’s public hospitals under a limited registration system have come under fire from local doctors’ groups who say the scheme could affect the quality of medical care provided. The critics are unhappy doctors under the scheme will be exempted from taking a licensing exam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,1987],"tags":[60,40],"class_list":["post-3214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-april-2012","category-issue-124","tag-health","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3214"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3564,"href":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3214\/revisions\/3564"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/varsity.com.cuhk.edu.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}