Many HK doctors back Hospital Authority's overseas recruitment drive

I am a local medical graduate and a public hospital consultant physician who has worked in public hospitals for 33 years.

I wrote to these columns suggesting that the Hospital Authority should recruit overseas doctors as soon as possible to alleviate our severe doctor deficiency ('Overseas graduates must be employed in public hospitals', May 12).

Despite employing all the 250 graduating interns by this July, the authority will still have more than 200 doctor vacancies unfilled this year. Therefore, it has planned to recruit 20 overseas doctors under limited registration to fill a small part of this gap.

These overseas doctors can only work for the authority but not in the private sector. They must speak Cantonese and English, have at least three years' post-internship working experience and must hold a qualification equivalent to the intermediate examination of the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine.

Unfortunately, this recruitment exercise is fiercely and publicly opposed by a number of local doctor professional associations.

The public may easily be misled to believe that our entire profession is unsympathetic to its needs. This impression is wrong.

In fact, after my letter was published, I received a lot of feedback from colleagues working in public as well as private hospitals, expressing their strong support for the authority's recruitment plan. I am, in fact, rather touched by those already working in the private sector who supported my views.