Around a quarter of the Ukrainian doctors who have come to Ireland since the Russian invasion of their country could start working here within a year but most must first overcome significant language issues with targeted classes intended to help them due to start in January, according to Dr Kateryna Kachurets.
Having arrived in Dublin in 2016 and completed her own training at St Vincent’s Hospital, Dr Kachurets now works as a GP in Tallaght and also with the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) and HSE, playing a key role in helping to co-ordinate the health service’s response to the many people who have fled the war.
As part of that, she also liaises with the many doctors who have arrived and want to start using their qualifications here. More than 300 have registered with the Medical Council and Dr Kachurets says those with fluent English, around a quarter according to the doctors’ own assessments during the registration process, could potentially be working in supervised roles within as little as six months.
For the rest, learning English might be the greatest barrier to resuming work as a doctor here, one potentially exacerbated by time spent in “Ukrainian bubbles” around Ireland where there is little need to use English as a day-to-day language.
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As part of a package of measures funded by the HSE to help the doctors work here, language classes will be offered from January. The aim will be to get them to the point where they can demonstrate their proficiency in internationally recognised exams.
At that point, they move on to tackling the medical exams required of foreign doctors. The most obvious is the Professional and Linguistic Assessment Board (Plab) test usually run by the UK’s General Medical Council.
There are other options such as the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), which can be done in Ireland, but Dr Kachurets says that the preference is to do the Plab despite it not being run regularly.
With the next sitting likely to be almost a year away, a general working group involving representatives of the HSE, Medical Council. ICGP and bodies responsible for other specialist areas, are looking at ways of speeding the process up, including the possibility of running Plab exams themselves.
‘Big barrier’
“I think within a year tops, they should be able to register, maybe even within six months,” Dr Kachurets says of those with good English to start with. “But the problem is that they’re not willing to take the exam alternatives. They’re willing to wait for Plab, this is one thing. Then [for others] English is a big barrier.
‘You can’t really practise medicine in Ireland within the Ukrainian bubble because of all of the official documentation that’s done in English, all of the referrals’
“I know that just taking those two tests they are not fully registered with the Medical Council, but they’re still able to start working as doctors while supervised, and then take the third [Pres 3] exam while they’re working. I know it’s maybe not ideal, but it’s still better than not working at all.”
Dr Kachurets says she is aware of the suggestion that Ukrainian doctors could work with other members of a Ukrainian community she puts at 68,000 while waiting to undertake the various exams but, she says, it is simply not practical.
Why are Ukrainian doctors struggling to find work in Ireland?
Hundreds of Ukrainian doctors are arriving into Ireland, eager to take up work in the health service. However, they are facing barriers when it comes to registering with the Irish Medical Council. Sorcha Pollak speaks to Dr Nicholas Stefanovic to find out why. We also hear from Victoria Sinelnik, a newly qualified Ukrainian doctor who arrived in Ireland last March and is hoping to start her medical career.
“You can’t really practise medicine in Ireland within the Ukrainian bubble because of all of the official documentation that’s done in English, all of the referrals... if you have to send somebody to A&E, if you have to communicate with consultants and different specialities or on-call doctors or physios...
She speaks of one young woman doctor who had to relocate her family twice because of the war and simply does not want to put her children through the process again
“You can’t just treat a patient, like write a prescription and there you go. It’s never going to work. They have to practice in the Irish context. They have to be able to communicate with everyone else, because medicine is a team sport, not something you can do on your own.
“And the second thing is that in Ukraine, the protocols are a little bit different. Things are not as strictly regulated. We need to make sure that they know all of those protocols before they’re allowed to manage people with chronic disease, diabetes, hypertension, because they have to be doing it the same way.”
For those not already proficient in English, that might all take a while, but many, she believes, now see their long-term future here.
“I think it’s essentially a 50/50 kind of situation. Fifty per cent of them probably think that they’ll go back home when the war is over but there’s a big percentage of people who have decided that they’re not going to go back.”
‘Building their careers’
She speaks of one young woman doctor who had to relocate her family twice because of the war and simply does not want to put her children through the process again.
For others, she says, “especially young doctors, they can see it as an opportunity. They’re going to start building their careers here.”
