A curriculum has been prepared to enable newly-graduate doctors to be able to follow specialisation courses here rather than have to move abroad, Joe Cassar, Parliamentary Secretary for Health, told Parliament this evening.

He said these courses will include medicine, surgery, orthopedics, anesthesia, pediatrics, gynecology and ophthalmology, among others.

Dr Cassar said interviews were currently being held for the engagement of training coordinators who would conduct the courses in Malta as from the next academic year .

This, he said, contrasted with the claim made by the opposition yesterday that as many as 70 percent of newly graduated doctors were thinking of moving abroad.

Dr Cassar also pointed out that the system in the UK - where Maltese doctors go to follow specialisation courses - had now been changed. Whereas in the past doctors could follow a two-year housemanship in their own countries and then move to the UK to specialise, now doctors interested in following such post-graduate courses were required to undergo their housemanship in the UK itself, without any guarantee that they would then be accepted for the courses they wished to follow.