The Neue Westfälische reported that the Medical Association Westphalia-Lippe has sounded the alarm: Gaps exist in the expertise of foreign doctors who want to work in Germany, and these gaps threaten, according to chamber president Theodor Windhorst from Bielefeld, to affect the care of patients.
The reason may be because the Chamber may only check their linguistic, but not their professional competence. Patient deaths have been occuring where these doctors work.
For example, a child in a hospital in Westphalia-Lippe had died at birth on the watch of a gynecologist from Libya that had been certified by the home country but was apparently not qualified to do the work. The doctor was sentenced to a suspended sentence for negligent homicide but continued to work at another hospital.
In the second case, a male patient died after being admitted under the influence of alcohol. Without further diagnosis, he was sent off to the psychiatry ward where he died of a brain hemorrhage. Both the ambulance and the on-duty doctor of psychiatry were physicians “with foreign degrees and questionable language skills,” said the chamber.
The editors of the Neue Westfälische commented that it was not a matter of putting foreign doctors under general suspicion, but asking whether the mechanisms for authorizing doctors from “third” countries, as the non-EU countries are called, are watertight in each individual case. If the observations of the Ärztekammer Westfalen-Lippe apply, there are certainly doubts.
The fear of fake doctors from such third countries is growing in Germany. One must exclude, said the president of the German Medical Association, Montgomery, “that are people are working as doctors who have bought certificates in their home countries, without ever having been to the university”.
It is currently not acceptable to issue professional licenses and approvals only on the basis of language examinations and after checking the submitted written documents.
However, the Minister of Health in Lower Saxony, Carola Reimann (SPD) has rejected the initiative of the Lower Saxony Medical Association to tighten the existing admission rules for third-party doctors in order to protect patients.
This appeals to the federal government, because in the leftist political milieu, it is clear that the Syrian “refugee doctor” comes first, after which the German patient’s right follow. The problems have been known since May 2017 by the Medical Association of Lower Saxony.
What has happened in the last two years with ” fake” doctors from third countries, only rarely comes to light.
Fortunately, one of the critics, Prof. Wolfgang Meins from the Hamburger UKE, does not mince his words: “Of course, supervisory authorities would not have an interest in hospitals publicizing their misdemeanors.”