More foreign junior doctors are opting to spend the first two years of their career in Malta while fewer Maltese medical students are going overseas when they graduate, according to audits of the doctors’ programme of studies.
The programme, termed the Foundation Programme, is a structured system covering the first two years of doctors’ training before they acquire their licence to practise outside hospital. Also known as the house officer years, the programme is modelled on the UK system.
The programme essentially puts locally-trained doctors on the same level as their counterparts in the UK with the certificate issued within the framework of the Foundation Programme giving them the same fighting chance for any window of opportunity that opens for them. This offers a degree of job security for doctors wishing to work here.
While in 2007, 63.6 per cent of local graduate doctors started working in Malta, this year’s locally trained workforce upped the figures to 84.2 per cent, not including the eight foreigners who joined the Mater Dei Hospital workforce, which largely “make up” for the doctors lost to other countries.
Interestingly, two of the eight foreigners came from the UK, the country that most attracts Maltese doctors.
According to Foundation Programme director Kevin Cassar, the number of UK applicants for next year is expected to rise. “Part of the reason for this is that the UK Foundation Programme Office anticipates that, in 2011, they will be oversubscribed,” Mr Cassar said.
Following a survey by the Medical Association of Malta, which scrutinised the working conditions of junior doctors after revealing that house officers worked 70 to 80 hours per week, the Foundation Programme looked into the matter and found that the actual figures were quite different.
According to Mr Cassar, the payroll statistics reveal that first-year doctors work about 68 hours per week and doctors in their second year of training did 55 hours a week on average.
He thinks the 56-hour working time directive proposed by the European Commission will be implemented in due course but he is unsure whether the rigid working hours are sufficient, especially for specialisations like surgery, which requires a significant time of hands-on training before reaching consultant level.
Commenting on duties, where young doctors work some 24 to 30 hours at a stretch, Mr Cassar said: “I think there’s no doubt that excessive hours are detrimental to everybody. I think the difficulty is finding the right balance between getting adequate experience to gain confidence and be a safe doctor without getting into a situation where the number of hours worked at a stretch is detrimental.”
The Foundation Programme does not only aim to keep doctors but also works to have better trained doctors regularly assessed throughout the two years of foundation training.
The programme, which obtains feedback from the doctors every three months, has reaped very good results. “The feedback is glowing,” Mr Cassar admitted.
Not only had the programme enticed more doctors to remain on the island, he said, but, as a result of changes to other postgraduate programmes, no doctors who graduated from the “first batch” applied to work abroad.