Minister made valid points on foreign doctors in PNG

IN the article “Malabag slams foreign doctors” (The National, March 1), the Minister for Health made some observations that needs national policy attention.
The Nepalese trainee oncologist who was brought in to understudy specialist Dr John Niblett left for Australia after he secured a better job. That is not his fault. Many of our national doctors and medical profession are also fleeing to Australia taking up rural medical postings.
Part of the reason is that many of our national professionals are undermined in their own country. This goes for other professions too. We are seeing an influx of Filipinos, South Asians, and other nationalities to train here, or taking over national jobs, and move on to other greener pastures at the expense of PNG Nationals.
The country spends so much to maintain Dr Niblett and other internationals in various technical and advisory roles.
As Malabag rightly pointed out, part of their key deliverable should build and strengthen national capacity and systems.
However, in most cases they leave without building any nationals to take over or continue the services.
While I respect Niblett for his services, sadly he has not built any national oncologist to take over.
Thus, when he left, the cancer services in Lae was disrupted and resulted in many unnecessary deaths.
It is not just Department of Personnel Management to ensure accountability and deliverables for persons like Niblett but also Department of Labour and Malabag’s of Department of Health.
In fact, Department of Health is known for hosting such expensive consultants and advisers without scrutiny to ensure local capacity building.
They hosted the very expensive Capacity Building Service Centre (CBSC) with JTAI to build national capacity for 6 years in 2000s. However, the final independent evaluation of CBSC found that no sustained national capacity was built and much of the funds were spent for short-term consultants from overseas.
Even organisations like World Health Organisations (WHO) and United Nations in general have an obligatory normative responsibility to build national capacity.
However, since their establishment no PNG national has being to work internationally through WHO or the United Nations. Instead, those organisations bring amateurs from other countries to have their training and development experience here in PNG and go out as experts.
This is despite all the preaching UN does internationally about principles of Paris and Accra Declarations for Aid Effectiveness.
Therefore, UN or other external contractors are only here in PNG for their own agenda and not necessarily for genuine development of PNG.
PNG must strongly enforce strict accountability on national capacity building than rhetoric lip service.
Department of Personnel Management’s work on the regulations of non-citizen technical adviser and citizen technical adviser is a good framework to institutionalise greater accountability by expensive foreign consultants and advisers.
The policy must be strictly enforced with a view to build a sustainable national technical capacity in line with global principles of aid effectiveness and sustainable development goals.

Digani Wekilofo
Waigani, NCD