According to a recent OECD study, foreigners are making up an increasing number of medical specialists. They are coming to the country because of much higher wages for specialists than back home and a highly successful recruitment campaign. Across the EU, the number of foreign doctors has increased by sixty percent in the last nine years.
‘You don’t really need to know the language that well to do what I do,’ explained an anaesthesiologist training in Oulu University Hospital and originally Tajikistan. ‘You don’t need to have much to do with the patients. It’s a kind of international language of medicine.’
The doctor is undergoing training at the hospital in order to improve his Finnish (he speaks Russian but very little English) and because the Finnish government ‘doesn’t recognise a medical qualification from Tajikistan. They kind of want more proof.’
Oulu also has a number of Russian doctors and further south, in Kokkola, there is a Spanish doctor at one of the medical practices.
‘He speaks Finnish surprisingly well,’ explained one former patient. ‘Fluently . . . but you always hear an accent.’
Northern Finland has a particular shortage of doctors working in the state sector because so many medical graduates either work in the south of the country or in private practice. This has led to extremely long waiting times at medical centres, something which may be alleviated by foreign doctors who can communicate in Finnish.
