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Table III.1.10: International Quality Standards and Globalization
Source: Segouin et al., (2005, Table 1)
To level up the qualifications of the foreign doctors to that of the local health care
workforce, most of the OECD countries have set up a system to recognize foreign
qualifications. In United States, all foreign trained doctors have to re-do their internship.
In the United Kingdom, foreign-trained doctors need to take a test and if they pass have
to wait for about a year before being fully registered. In Canada, those foreign-trained
doctors have to go medical training at a Canadian university for a length of time between
two to six years. In France, although in theory, foreign nationals need to receive an
equivalency, many of those doctors, in reality, practice in French public hospitals.
Moreover, an important effort has been concerted to regularize the situation of those
doctors a new structure has been set up to recognize foreign qualifications.
In addition to foreign born doctors have also to take a language test, which could explain
the outpouring of foreigners into countries with which they share history, administrative
and legislative framework as well as the language. Path dependency seems to be an
important determinant to choose the destination country. This explicates the outpouring
of migration from India and Pakistan to Australia, Canada, UK and US, whereas
physicians from North Africa migrate toward France (Bourassa et al., (2004). A country
like Portugal, for example, seems to particularly attract, those health workers migrants
from Portuguese speaking countries as seen in table III.1.11.
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