OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Tuesday 8.30pm.
ELEVEN foreign doctors are free to work in the private sector after the Pretoria High Court overturned a measure of the National Interim Medical and Dental Council restricting them to the public sector.
The court ordered Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma and the NIMDC to register the doctors “without restrictions” within the next seven days.
The council refused the doctors full registration unless they wrote a final year medical exam together with the interns they had been training at various hospitals. The doctors all became South African citizens in 1991.
The doctors argued the conditions set by the council were unwarranted as their qualifications are either equivalent or superior to the South African qualification.
They said the council’s failure to afford them full registration was unfair, unjustifiable, discriminatory and unconstitutional.
The doctors also felt aggrieved by the fact that some of their colleagues, who became South African citizens before December 31, 1991, were fully registered without having to write an exam — in terms of a special dispensation set up by the government to assist returned exiles. Those gaining citizenship after that date were not included in the dispensation.
MacArthur said the question of citizenship “bears no relationship to a person’s ability to practise medicine”.
“In the result it seems to me that the council, by insisting on the plaintiffs sitting the examination to obtain full registration made a decision which is entirely arbitrary. The plaintiffs have been unreasonably discriminated against and this follows because their professional ability has not been challenged.” the judge said.