Source : The Peninsula
DOHA - FEB 04: Healthcare professionals seeking a licence to practise in Qatar will now be able to take the mandatory competency tests online and outside the country, as the examinations are being outsourced.
The Supreme Council of Health (SCH) has signed a long-term agreement with Prometric, a leading international provider of technology-enabled testing and assessment services, to conduct the exams globally.
The SCH will completely eliminate its paper and pencil exams and will change all of its exams to a computer-based format. The online examinations will soon be available at the nearly 10,000 testing centres of Prometric spread over 164 countries.
The new exam system will be introduced from the last week of March, said Dr Jamal Rashid Al Khanji, Acting Director of the Medical Licensing Department at SCH at a news conference yesterday.
“We have already stopped the manual examinations. The last exams were in December, for pharmacists and dentists. There were about 200 candidates and it was a painstaking experience to conduct the tests for all of them manually,” said Al Khanji.
The department had suspended the exams for physicians some time ago because the testing system had become outdated, he added.
Mohammad Shadid, regional development manager, Prometric, said the new exam system was specially designed for Qatar, in line with the requirements of the SCH.
Prometric will soon open an examination centre in Qatar in partnership with the SCH. However, the applicants will be able to take the examinations in any of the Prometric centres across the world, even before their arrival to Qatar.
Prometric delivers and administers more than eight million tests a year on behalf of 450 clients in the academic, professional, healthcare, government, corporate and information technology sectors.
The company has 900 examination centres in the region offering various types of examinations. However, Qatar is only the second Gulf country after Saudi Arabia to conduct medical examinations in partnership with Prometric.
The tests will be conducted and monitored by the Prometric centres. Each examinee will get a separate set of questions and the centre will guide them regarding the procedures and formalities.
The questions are prepared by experts in the respective fields and are intended to test the basic competency of the examinees, said Shadid.
“Any person cannot just walk in and take the tests. There are certain formalities to check the personal details and credentials of the examinees. The candidates will get a certificate after the tests, but it will not be considered an authentic document. The results will be transferred directly to the Supreme Council of Health in a very safe and confidential manner,” he added.
Initially, the exams will be held in six categories — physicians, dentists, nurses and midwives, lab technicians, physiotherapists and pharmacists. “In future, we will get into the field of specialists’ examinations,” said Al Khanji.
Details about the fee structure and test formalities will be announced soon, said the officials.