33 Cuban doctors for TT

The Health Ministry has recently recruited 33 specialist doctors from Cuba as part of the overall strategy to address the shortage of suitably qualified health professionals in the public health system.

These doctors are the seventh batch of Cuban nationals who have been integrated into the public health sector in recent years for a contracted period of three years, to fill vacancies that have not been filled by qualified nationals.

The speciality areas include anaesthesiology, cardiology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, haematology, intensive care, maxillofacial surgery, neonatology, neurosurgery, neurology, oncology, opthalmology, orthopaedics, pediatric emergency, pulmonology, radiology, rheumatology, thoracic surgery, urology and vascular surgery.

The doctors are currently undergoing a one-week orientation and are expected to replace the previous team of Cuban doctors at regional health authorities (RHAs) who have completed their four year contracts.

Chief medical officer Dr Roshan Parasram said the ministry had only brought in subspecialists.

"We are not bringing in foreign doctors who are junior doctors and who are not specialised in certain fields. Before we had called all the RHAs to do advertisements over the last one or two years to ensure that no locals wanted these positions before we brought in any foreign nationals. These positions would have been advertised openly and the ones that were filled, we did not bring in anybody for those positions."

Parasram said the doctors were hired as registrars and not as specialist medical officers. He said only doctors from TT and others from other countries who would have been in the system for a long time, and applied for the job years ago would be at the specialist medical officer or consultant level.

"They would coming in through a government to government arrangement we had with Cuba, a long-standing arrangement for which we renewed the MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) in April last year for only specialties we don't have to fill the posts in TT."

Asked why TT did not have specialists to fill these posts, Parasram said the deficiencies were not in the general specialities.

"We have medical specialists, internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics, but when we go into the sub-speciality for paediatric, cardiology, paediatric neurology -- in most countries our size we have difficulty filling because we don't have the capacity to do all the subspecialty works.

"In some cases our packages are not as attractive as in Canada or the United Kingdom. They may have more lucrative remuneration , so even when we train our people they sometimes migrate for better pay and better conditions."

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"33 Cuban doctors for TT"

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