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Daily Mail
April 19, 2014
Foreign doctors who want to work in the UK should be required to get better exam results to ensure patient safety, researchers are urging.
To practise in the UK, doctors currently have to pass exams testing their medical knowledge and English language skills.
But the study concluded that the pass mark is set too low – and insisted that foreign doctors who pass are not up to the same standard as newly-trained doctors in Britain.
Researchers at University College London and the University of Cambridge found the international graduates got substantially lower marks in exams for would-be GPs and physicians.
Foreign doctors must pass an English language test and the General Medical Council’s Professional and Linguistic Assessment Board (PLAB) test, designed to ensure that overseas doctors demonstrate the same level of medical knowledge and clinical skills as UK graduates who have completed their first foundation training year.
The researchers compared the results of these two tests to the performance of UK graduates taking exams set by the Royal Colleges of Physicians and the Royal College of General Practitioners.
They said that raising the exam pass mark ‘considerably’ – by up to 20 per cent – would ensure both sets of doctors were of a similar standard.
But they also warned this would cut the pass rate and could cause a shortage of candidates for the NHS, which is heavily reliant on foreign medical staff.
Around one in three doctors registered with the GMC qualified in other countries, with 27 per cent obtaining their medical degree from outside the European Economic Area.
Concerns over the abilities of foreign-trained doctors were brought to the fore by the death of 70-year-old retired engineer David Gray in 2008. He was given ten times the normal dose of diamorphine by German locum Dr Daniel Ubani.
