French government looks to immigration to help plug health workers gap, but candidates are not always up to scratch

France’s government, like many across Europe,1 is turning to non-European Union (EU) trained doctors to help offset the chronic shortage of hospital staff. On 30 January, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced to parliament that he would appoint an emissary to seek out doctors abroad wishing to practise in France and to encourage French doctors who qualified outside France to return home.The announcement caused uproar. It showed “a lack of respect for the countries where these doctors were trained,” said Jean-Luc Dumas, director general of the Conference of Deans of French Language Faculties of Medicine. The targets will be doctors from French speaking former colonies and other countries where medical faculties have strived for decades to reach international standards and populations have “immense health needs,” Dumas said in an article in Le Monde on 8 February. But the announcement also failed to tackle the status of non-EU doctors in France. Many…
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