Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh is insisting there are jobs available for medical graduates. However, he says the real problem is that after their internship, the young doctors afre refusing to accept work in rural communities and other areas outside busy city centres.
He said they often “apply to become house officers in an area of speciality where we do not have vacancies, so we may offer them other positions while we wait to place them in the area of choice.” In some cases, he said the applicants “may actually fail the interview, because to become a house officer you have to be interviewed, some fail. Some may not get their area of speciality, we may offer them something else and they refuse.”
Deyalsingh said while the ministry wants to assist, “we cannot accommodate every house officer in their area of speciality in the RHA of their choosing.” He said the problem is compounded if an offer is made of the position of house officer in the outlying districts.
“They don’t want that, they only want to work in a hospital, so we are bending backwards to accommodate them but they decline and that is the story going on years now.”
On an annual basis, close to 200 young doctors graduate locally. The irony is that while these young doctors can’t get jobs in the healthcare system for whatever reason, the ministry continues to employ foreign doctors, Cubans in particular.
Deyalsingh said this is because “the doctors don’t want to take up the positions that we offer them, so we now have to bring in the Cubans to do that work.”
He could not say how many Cuban doctors are currently employed locally, but admitted he had “just come back from Cuba on a recruiting mission.
But Deyalsingh said the problem is not unique to Trinidad and Tobago. In what he held out as a ray of hope, Deyalsingh said, “with the Point Fortin Hospital coming on and with the Arima Hospital coming on there will be more opportunities for house officers.”
Asked if there would be opportunities at the Couva Hospital, he said the facility “will be run as a different entity. That will be for UWI to decide how they run Couva.” Pointing to plans for the Couva Hospital announced by Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, Deyalsingh said, “UWI will reconfigure the hospital to suit national needs.”
But with another 240 final year medical students graduating this year, senior doctors expressed concern about the long-term implications of the bottleneck of students who can’t get jobs, suggesting there is the need for diversification and more options for the profession.