A JUNIOR doctor working at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda has such a poor command of the English language he is unable to work on call, according to internal correspondence.
The doctor is one of nine junior doctors working in the hospital’s anaesthetics department, which is severely understaffed after management was unable to fill all 14 anaesthetic NCHD (non-consultant hospital doctor or junior doctor) posts on offer earlier this summer.
The head of the hospital’s anaesthetics department, Dr Michael Staunton, in a letter to the clinical director of Louth Meath Hospitals Dr Doiminic Ó Brannagáin in the past month, said that despite being on the medical council’s specialist register in his home country and Ireland, the doctor “is unable to work on call because of extremely poor English”.
Asked how the doctor worked at any other time of day if his English was so poor, the HSE issued a general statement. It said that in recent weeks it proposed to the council that a language competency test be given to all doctors seeking to work in Ireland. At present, the test applies to only non-EU doctors, but not doctors coming into the country from eastern Europe.
Earlier yesterday the council, as it launched its annual report, said it was “extremely concerned” about doctors from other EU countries working in Ireland who may not have the right language or clinical skills to do their jobs effectively.
The council has written to the Department of Health in recent weeks as part of a lobbying campaign aimed at amending EU law to enable closer scrutiny of doctors coming from other EU states.
Dr Staunton's letter, which has been seen by The Irish Times, said that of the nine out of 14 NCHD posts in anaesthesia which the Lourdes hospital had managed to fill, four "require extremely close supervision and support".
One of these is the doctor with extremely poor English and two of the others have “minimal experience with epidural anaesthesia”. Epidurals would be required regularly at the maternity hospital.
The hospital is not unique in having a shortage of junior doctors. Several hospitals have been affected this summer but Dr Staunton warned the present level of anaesthetic cover at his hospital “is highly unsafe for patients and staff”.
He said part of the reason for the shortage was excessive workload, cuts in the pay of junior doctors, changes in visa regulations, a reduction in the number of recognised training posts and an increase in the pass mark for the International English Language Testing exam.
Junior doctors rotate positions every six months. The junior doctors working in anaesthesia in Drogheda have six-month contracts which expire at the end of this year. They are needed to fill round-the-clock rosters.