Ham-fisted policies, overworked officials put foreign doctors 'on ice'

Eager to work in South Africa’s understaffed public hospitals, hundreds of foreign doctors with permanent local residence status have spent two years languishing ‘on ice’ because of executive inaction and official suspicion. One estimate from an insider at the national health department’s Foreign Workforce Management Programme (FWMP) put the number at 300 - equivalent to the annual output of two South African medical schools. The FWMP has issued letters of endorsement to most of these foreign qualified doctors, stating they have met a set of stringent criteria qualifying them to work in South Africa. They are married to South Africans and come mainly from Nigeria or, to a lesser extent, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), putting them in double jeopardy as sceptical officials enforce a moratorium on their being hired or cite Third World country ‘anti-poaching’ policy agreements. None are part of the health department-favoured ‘country-to-country’ agreements. Exhaustive attempts to secure official confirmation of such a moratorium (on hiring foreign doctors married to South Africans) and to find out why a long-ordered review of policy on recruitment of foreign health care professionals has yet to be undertaken, proved fruitless.