AUSTRALIA: Job-Seeking Overseas Trained Doctors Find it Tough

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sumegha Agarwal

SYDNEY, Australia, Jan 8 1997 (IPS) - It is a story of shattered dreams and lost esteem for many developing country trained doctors who have over the years emigrated to Australia in the hope of pursuing a medical career.

Their ambitions have been ruined by what they claim is a discriminatory qualifying examination system — a charge dismissed by Australian authorities who say it is a matter of selecting the best for the few jobs available in the field.

Dr Burney Siddiqui is one of those who thinks the system is unduly weighted against non-Australian nationals, particularly non- whites.

A doctor of Indian origin, he responded to an advertisement in the British Medical Journal which said come to “the land of milk and honey and opportunities” to work for New South Wales Health Services. The offer included airfare, permanent residency and assurance of registration of qualification.

“On the insistence of my wife who was quite enamoured with the natural beauty of Australia”, Siddiqui said they left their home in London and came to Australia. “I fell straight into hell…and am still in that hell fire” he told IPS.

On arrival, Siddiqui learnt he would need to pass the Australian Medical Council (AMC) examination before he could practice. Three attempts between 1992 and 1994 ended in failure.

In 1993, he lodged a formal complaint under the Racial Discrimination Act at the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) charging that the 200 per year foreign doctor quota licencing system implemented by the AMC limited the success rate of aspiring practitioners.

In August, 1995, the HREOC ruled the quota system was discriminatory and unlawful. However, the AMC appealed to the Federal Court which overruled the HREOC decision and Siddiqui was asked to pay the AMC costs.

“I was booted out for the reason that I am not an Anglo-Celtic person, I am an Indian,” Siddiqui charged, adding that consistent failures had “disturbed my mind”.

The case that Siddiqui and other doctors of developing country origins have against the AMC registration process is partly backed up by a 1989 survey conducted by the Centre for Multicultural Studies at Wollongong University.

The survey of overseas trained professionals revealed that in some professions, including medicine, preferential treatment is given to graduates of universities in Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, Britain and the United States.

According, the study concluded that there was “apparent bias” against people seeking employment in Australia with qualifications obtained in countries where English is not the dominant language.

Significantly, in the wake of the overturned HREOC decision the quota system was revised and all overseas trained doctors (OTDs) who had met the minimum requirements of the AMC exam, but had previously been caught by the quota ceiling, are now allowed to undertake a subsequent clinical examination.

But now they face a new obstacle in the coming into effect on Jan. 1, of new legislation stipulating that aspiring doctors will have to wait for ten years before they can get a medicare provider number — a must for practicing doctors — even if they clear the two-phase AMC examination.

The AMC is also considering limiting the number of attempts an OTD is allowed to sit qualifying examinations over a period of five years. Since Australian graduates get only two attempts at their final exams, OTDs should have a ceiling, officials argue.

“We have too many doctors. We are trying to get Australian universities to reduce its graduates,” Bob Wells, Assistant Secretary, Department of Health and Family Service told IPS while defending the new legislation.

For OTDs, the majority of whom come from developing countries, the new law virtually wipes out any slim hopes they had of pursuing medical careers in Australia. There are presently about 1,200 overseas trained doctors in Australia seeking to get their qualifications recognised by federal authorities.

While waiting to clear the AMC exams, many have ended up doing jobs they would never have dreamt of doing back home.

A survey conducted by the Bureau of Immigration Research involving 206 OTDs who were resident in Victoria between April 1985 to April 1990, found that many took medical jobs for which they were over-qualified, or even non-medical related employment.

Those finding employment in the medical field took up jobs as nursing assistants, process workers, hospital orderlies, medical receptionists. Others worked in mortuaries as attendants while some found work as cleaners, waiters, mail sorters and taxi drivers while waiting to retake AMC examinations.

Surveyed doctors said the need to relearn basic medicine and the lack of patient contact are among the main problems they face in preparing for the examinations. Earning a living while they wait for the next examination also meant they could not devote enough time to studies.

“Those who have failed the AMC exams did so because they didn’t have time to study,” says Dr Kavita Kumar, who has managed to pass the AMC examination and is currently doing her internship in a Sydney hospital.

“The circumstances are made even more difficult by the fact that you come from a background where you were top of the society and here you are nothing. You feel depressed. And the most frustrating part of the experience is the way AMC keeps bringing changes to the registration procedures,” says Kumar.

“I strongly feel that graduates here, if made to sit in the AMC exam after 10 years of being out there, most of them would fail,” she added.

Even now, Kumar says she feels like an outsider. “Maybe this is the situation with migrants everywhere…in all professions. OTDs are not…part of the club”.

Frustrated, the doctors have formed the Australian Overseas Trained Doctors Association (AOTDA) and have set up a task force to lobby for their interests with federal and state health authorities.

Dr Asaad Razaghi, President of the AOTDA, has for the last eight years been trying to clear the AMC exams. A Kurdish refugee from Iran, he has managed to survive by working as an interpreter in the Persian, Kurdish and Dari languages.

Others who have found employment hard to come by while awaiting examinations are so deflated that they have threatened suicide, he says, referring to calls he and other AOTDA officers have received.

“Eight years of struggle has resulted in unnecessary trauma, frustration and loss of pride for me and my family. I wish for nothing else but to practice medicine in peace. It is my greatest passion and has been since I was a young man and a witness to the injustices to my people – the Kurds,” he says.

Iranian Dr Syrus Razzaghipour, a qualified aneasthologist with 15 years experience in the field, has already thrown in the towel. Saying that the new legislation will make it almost impossible for OTDs to pursue their profession here, he has set up a florist business in a Sydney suburb.

Australian doctors are however applauding the government. The authorities should have taken this measure a long time ago, says Dr Harry Nespolan, Health Services Director in the Australian Medical Association — the doctors’ powerful professional union.

His position is that Australia has an “oversupply of doctors and thus importing doctors is not a clever thing”.