More than 100 doctors trained overseas who have been blocked by the Health Professions Council (HPCSA) from practising in South Africa have launched urgent court proceedings in a bid to be registered as medical professionals, reports Pretoria News. The HPCSA has not invited them to sit the required examinations not does it answer their inquiries, the applicants claim.
The group – some of whom have been in limbo since 2019 – will turn to the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria at the end of the month. They want to interdict the HPCSA and the Medical and Dental Professional Board from invoking the provisions of the New Pathway Policy Guideline for foreign-trained doctors, adopted in June last year, which prevents them from writing their qualifying exams.
The group said the HPCSA in any event could not hold them to those guidelines because another judge in a similar application had set aside the provisions. The doctors said in court papers that they simply wanted to write the required clinical exams required for foreign-trained doctors, scheduled for next month. The HPCSA, however, is refusing to enrol them for this.
All of the applicants are South African citizens and have graduated from medical training institutions based in China, Mauritius, Romania, Ukraine and Malaysia.
The HPCSA has not yet filed its answering affidavits to the application.
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