Some foreign doctors don't speak Spanish

PALMA
SOME of the 615 foreign doctors who work in the Balearics (13.1 percent of the total) do not speak, or have little knowledge of Spanish or Catalan, the two official languages of the region.

Because of this, the Medical College is asking the Balearic Government to guarantee that they should know at least one of these languages. The President of the Official College of Doctors, Joan Gual, announced that the College will offer “collaboration” to the Balearic Ministry of Health to jointly organise programmes for teaching Spanish, Catalan and English, directed both at foreign and Spanish doctors. “It is important that foreign doctors should be required to have a knowledge of Spanish or Catalan”, he said as, when treating a patient it is essential that the doctor can understand the patient's explanations and vice versa. Gual, although not having any specific figures, calculated that around half of foreign doctors work in the public health sector.

The College's latest report, based on data from July, shows that the number of foreign doctors has increased by 50 percent during the last few years.
Almost half (306) of foreign doctors in the Balearics are from Latin America, mainly from Argentina and Cuba, 40 percent were born and trained in European Union countries, mainly Germany, and around 10 percent come from other countries. “It would be good if the foreign doctors also had a knowledge of the culture, and of how our health system works”, said the President of the College, who added that it is the Balearic Government's responsibility to lay down the requirements to be complied with by foreign doctors who, in many cases, work in private centres dealing mainly with foreigners and tourists.