1,400 Ukrainian doctors waiting for their professional qualifications to be recognised in Germany

More than 1,600 Ukrainian doctors who fled to Germany in the wake of Russia’s full-scale aggression have applied for permission to practise medicine in Germany, and 1,400 of them are still awaiting a response.

Source: Welt am Sonntag, as reported by DW and European Pravda

Details: Only 187 applications have been approved so far. Gerald Gass, Chairman of the Board of the German Hospital Association, noted that the situation is critical.

The data is based on responses from 14 states, as the other two – Bremen and Hesse – provided incomplete data.

Ukrainians are not the only ones facing a long wait time to have their applications approved. It normally takes 15 months to three years from the time of application for doctors from non-EU countries to obtain a licence.

Gass said that "extensive bureaucracy is paralysing the process of recognising doctors’ qualifications" and stressed that what is needed is a "real de-bureaucratisation effort".

Susanne Johna, Head of the Marburger Bund Medical Association, also said "bureaucratic barriers and understaffed federal state authorities" were to blame.

Janosch Dahmen, the Green Party’s healthcare expert, said: "The German healthcare system is suffering from a catastrophic shortage of labour, and Ukrainian doctors could be a valuable support for us."

However, he sees a problem in how the process is organised at the level of the federal states: the large number of pending applications indicates that the existing procedures for recognising qualifications are ineffective and overly complex and bureaucratic.

Meanwhile, medical education in Germany’s European neighbours – such as Ukraine – is fully compliant with EU standards, Dahmen noted.

Background:

• According to official figures, over 800,000 of the more than one million Ukrainians in Germany are of working age, and about a quarter of them are employed.
• Last month Alexander Dobrindt, the leader of the Bavarian opposition CSU party in the Bundestag, called for unemployed Ukrainian refugees to be deported from Germany, a move criticised by the federal coalition.

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