POPULAR Democratic Movement leader McHenry Venaani says he will move a motion in the National Assembly today to call for a commission of inquiry into how foreign-trained medical graduates were awarded government loans without meeting requirements.
Health Professions Councils of Namibia registrar Cornelius Weyulu said in an affidavit filed at the High Court last week that the “medical graduates who studied in (Eastern) Europe are poorly trained”.
Last year, only two out of 206 foreign-trained graduates who sat for the pre-internship evaluation test conducted by the health professions council passed the examination.
Weyulu also told the court that 198 out of 206 Namibians who studied medicine in China, Russia and Ukraine did not meet Unam’s basic requirements for its school of medicine.
“To be frank, many of the graduates from (Eastern) European universities and China are of poor quality. They have been found wanting as interns in many a respect,” he said.
Weyulu stated that due to the poor nature of their training, foreign-trained medical graduates “would not do serious hard work”.
“They are not qualified to do serious hard work. […] As a result, other students from decent universities would do double work to cater for the gap created by the incompetence of the (Eastern) European and Chinese-trained students,” he said, adding that poorly trained medical professionals may have dire consequences “for life, limb and family life”.
reported last year that the foreign-trained doctors accused the Health Professions Councils of Namibia of contributing to the perception that they are incompetent.
The graduates have launched protests against the council, accusing the body of being unfair towards them.
Addressing a press conference yesterday in Windhoek, Venaani said an investigation into the matter was necessary to identify the people responsible for the approval of loans for “these so-called Grade 12 poor performers”.
Venaani alleged that on average, the government spends about N$87 000 per year for six years on each medical student.
Therefore, the estimated amount spent by the government on 240 foreign-trained medical students in the past six years was about N$125 million, he added.
The opposition leader said the government had spent too much to “write it off as incompetent, and not ready for merely failing a pre-internship evaluation test”.
“Who approved those bursaries if the graduates are said to have attended substandard universities? Somebody must be held accountable for lending these children N$125 million of taxpayers’ money. Now, 500 other students are waiting to graduate, and now we are talking about another N$280 million spent on doctors that are supposed to graduate,” he charged.
Venaani said the commission of inquiry would thus call all actors who are involved in the sector “to get to the bottom of the problem”.
He added that the commission would also have to question the criteria used by those responsible for the approval of loans at the time.
“We can’t have a country that spends about N$400 million on students, and when they come back to the country, we have no answers for them. Whoever gave that money to the students must be fired,” he stressed.
The PDM leader also urged the health professions council to develop a harmonised curriculum for the medical profession to ensure that “graduates are given a fair chance to prove themselves competent for the job”.
“Therefore, it is not enough to merely give a scope; a curriculum must be developed and study materials provided to takers of the exams,” he said.
“We are saying, let us not impose these graduates on the population of Namibia, but let us test them fairly with a developed curriculum so that we see how far these graduates can go,” he added.
