Hundreds of young graduates in the medical profession are finding it difficult to get jobs and are forced to take jobs which pay significantly less than the ones they are qualified to do.
But Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh is insisting the Ministry of Health tries to ensure that every intern in the system is employed. Sometimes though, Deyalsingh says the problem is that the young doctors are not willing to work in the rural areas and want to be placed in the regional health authority of their choice.
Several young doctors who spoke with the T&T Guardian lamented that their parents took loans to send them to university and now they are struggling to find work in order to help them repay those loans.
Their problems, they say, began after a one-year internship following graduation. The doctors said the Ministry of Health “employs interns just after they pass their final exams and qualify as doctors. But this is a one-year job, after that, we are left to fend for ourselves.”
Their internship involves working “extremely long hours, which we have no problem with because the experience is worth every minute that we spend at the hospitals with patients and away from our families.”
But they say what happens after the internship is a nightmare.
The young doctors apply to the regional health authorities for house officers position but are told there is not enough money to offer full-time contracts or any contracts at all.
A senior official of one RHA, who spoke to the Sunday Guardian on condition of anonymity, said the RHA had not hired any House Officer in the past three years because “truth be told, if you don’t have the money to put into the health sector the process of hiring is stymied. If the number of doctors increase so too does the annual budget of the hospital and the money is just not there.”
An official of the South West Regional Health Authority, which has a patient clientèle of over 600,000 patients stretching from Icacos to Guayaguayare, the largest demographic in the country, has under its purview two hospitals and 33 health centres. There are close to 300 house officers in the employ of the SWRHA.
Admitting that the hiring had “plateaued,” the official admitted to the Sunday Guardian that “we don’t have the number of officers required.”
The official said he would “strongly advise that some analysis be done of the patient to doctor ratio which exists. Some kind of analysis needs to be done and more money needs to be allocated to ensure that the health sector gets the required personnel needed, especially in South.”
While the RHAs may want to hire additional staff, it’s not up to them. They depend on allocations from the Government.
The basic salary of a House Officer, the Sunday Guardian was told, is about $13,000. When perks including travelling and other allowances are added it can be twice that amount, roughly $25,000 a month.
In May 2017, a group of 150 unemployed medical doctors sought an audience with then-president Anthony Carmona, expressing concern that having completed the internship programme they were virtually unemployed and sought jobs as clerks in stores or “other menial work to survive.” They blamed the situation on a “breakdown in the traditional apprenticeship system within the health sector.”
A year later, young doctors told the Sunday Guardian it’s “déjà vu all over again.” To compound matters, they lament that “sometimes the private nursing homes reach out to us but tell us we can work to get the experience but will not be paid, how laughable is that. We worked our butts off to qualify, did our internship and then through no fault of our own we are unable to get jobs.”
Some doctors said they were “able to get a ‘ten days’ when another doctor goes on vacation.”
No post-graduate or specialist training is possible because “UWI does not accept us unless we get a full-time job.” No full-time job also means they can’t get a bank loan.
One senior doctor described it as a “very worrying situation.” He expressed concern that there seemed to be “some sort of tension and a strain in communication between the Faculty of Medicine and the Ministry of Health.”