Foreign doctors in limbo

Ajit* has been a doctor for 16 years. He has worked as a resident in hospitals in the Ukraine and India, he has trained interns and students, he has had his own practice, and he is a New Zealand resident.

But he can’t get a first-year medical job in New Zealand.

He is not alone – 74 per cent of foreign doctors who passed the mandatory NZREX clinical exam in the past two years have not found jobs in medicine, according to Medical Council data.

Ajit, who lives in Wellington, said he had applied for more than 50 jobs all over the country since completing all the requirements for international medical graduates (IMGs) in 2016, and had not had a single interview.

Another Wellington man and New Zealand citizen, Ephrem, originally from an African country, has had the same trouble. He has worked in medicine in African and European countries but has not managed to secure an interview in any of the 14 health boards areas he has applied to work in.

‘‘It’s a waste of a trained person, from my perspective.’’

So, the men are limited to clinical observerships, which allow them to shadow doctors, but they are not allowed to touch patients or prescribe drugs.

‘‘You know what you are doing and what’s going on, you have done it so many times but you’re

not allowed to do it,’’ Ajit said.

It left his family in ‘‘nowhereland’’ as they tried to build a life in New Zealand through odd jobs and patchy income, he said.

Just under a decade ago, a huge number of our emerging doctor workforce were international graduates, and then health minister Tony Ryall lamented the number of locally trained doctors heading overseas.

So in 2012, changes were made to exclude NZREX graduates from the advanced choice of employment (ACE) programme, which now only applies to graduates from medical schools in New Zealand or Australia.

Ryall also increased medical school placements, and we were still seeing the tail-end of that effect, according to Deborah Powell, national secretary of the New Zealand Resident Doctors’ Association. ‘‘There just aren’t enough jobs to accommodate people coming into the country as well as our domestic supply. That’s the bottom line.’’

Powell believed the market would plateau again after 2019.

In the meantime, she felt we needed to be ‘‘a little more honest’’ with IMGs about our job market.

Medical Council chairman Andrew Connolly believed that, along with the employment restrictions, the issue boiled down to money.

‘‘A number of DHBs are under financial pressure so I guess if they have the choice of a doctor who brings funding versus one that doesn’t, they are going to go with the one who does.’’

Ajit’s wife has laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission – the second it has received on the issue in the past year. It has offered mediation.

* Names changed to protect current job placements.