Irish Medical Times Medical News for Healthcare Professionals
The RCPI has stressed it has been a strong advocate for the legislative amendments meant to simplify the registration for foreign medical graduates in the Trainee Specialist Division (TSD) of the Medical Register, even as Overseas Medics Ireland (OMI) has sought the Minister for Health’s intervention to facilitate the preliminary processing of their applications for registration pending the changes (‘Move will compound the exodus of doctors — OMI’, IMT 13/11/2015).
Dr Shakya Bhattacharjee, OMI General Secretary
A spokesperson for the College last week told IMT: “The RCPI has been a strong advocate for the legislative amendments to the Health Miscellaneous Provisions Bill to remove the requirement for a document equivalent to the certificate of experience for registration in the Trainee Specialist Division (TSD).”
Basic Specialist Training (BST) is a curriculum-based programme of supervised clinical training and doctors must be eligible for the TSD of the Irish Medical Council (IMC) register at the time of application, said the RCPI, which offers programmes in General Internal Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Histopathology and General Paediatrics, adding that training bodies and their BST programmes are approved by the Council.
“Each post-graduate training body has clear guidelines around equivalence for training undertaken outside of Ireland for candidates applying to a BST programme, equivalence of training/experience will be recognised if the training that is being considered has been successfully completed and provided through a structured programme formally recognised by a national training body in the jurisdictions of the UK (the Royal College of Physicians), Australia and New Zealand (the Royal Australasian College of Physicians), the US (ACGME Residency Programmes), Canada (the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada) and OMAN (Fellowship programme of the OMAN Medical Specialist Board).
Expressing his gratitude to the Minister for Health for his decision to amend the Medical Practitioners Act to make all competent non-EU doctors eligible for training jobs from 2016, OMI General Secretary Dr Shakya Bhattacharjee pleaded with Dr Leo Varadkar, in a letter dated November 4, to intervene to ensure they could apply for the July 2016 intake for these jobs, which has a closing date of this month, pending the amendments.
Despite the likelihood the changes could be effective before the next intake, the RCPI had declined to provisionally accept applications from non-EU doctors of certain countries on the basis they are ineligible for the TSD, he claimed.
lloyd.mudiwa@imt.ie
