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re: premier in sydney herald sun AND THIS ONE IS WORTH NOTING ALSO, PBI SHOULD BE PUSHING FOR ALL OS TRAINED DOCTORS TO HAVE TO PASS COMPETENCY TRAINING AND UPDATING OF SKILLS ON SIMULATORS


Foreign-trained GPs put patients at riskHolly Ife

October 23, 2006 12:00am

OVERSEAS-trained doctors could be putting Australian lives at risk with sub-standard knowledge and skills, according to a report.

A Monash University report says that even in the wake of the "Dr Death" scandal in Queensland, thousands of overseas-trained doctors recruited on temporary entry visas do not need to pass a formal test to assess their skills.
Indian-trained surgeon Dr Jayant Patel, nicknamed Dr Death, has been linked to more than 80 patient deaths at Bundaberg Base Hospital.

"We have seen from what happened with Dr Patel that when overseas-trained doctors have not been assessed and have ended up in a position of responsibility, there can be real problems," report co-author Dr Bob Birrell said yesterday.

"There are no hard rules in place to ensure that the quality of these doctors is up to the local standard."

Overseas-trained doctors are brought into Australia on temporary visas from countries such as India, Malaysia, China, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Most enter on temporary resident visas and take up "area of need" positions, which Australian health authorities claim cannot be filled by local doctors.

"There is a very large number of overseas-trained doctors coming into Australia on various visas -- thousands every year -- and more than half are from non-Western countries where we know little about the quality of their training, and there is no assessment of them," Dr Birrell said.

"In the past, we used to get people mainly from Britain where the standards are much the same as here so it wasn't really an issue. But as demand has increased, they have been forced to recruit from non-western countries."

Dr Birrell said many of the overseas-trained doctors on temporary visas were good at their jobs.

"Some are quite good. Some are marginal. And some should not be here. We are not assessing them to see, which of those categories they fall into," he said.