Times Of Swaziland: INTERN DOCTOR DEREGISTERED

INTERN DOCTOR DEREGISTERED
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BY MBONGISENI NDZIMANDZE on 09/02/2018 07:30:00


MBABANE - The Swaziland Medical and Dental Council has deregistered an aspiring
doctor who had been attending to patients for close to a year at the Mbabane
Government Hospital.
The council claims that Sipho Cyprian Mohale who studied Medicine at Shenyang
Medical College in China was not yet qualified to do medical internship.
According to the Registrar of the Swaziland Medical and Dental Council (SMDC),
Dr Priyani Mahaliyana Dissanayake, Mohale was discontinued to protect members of
the public from exposure to unqualified medical personnel.
He alleged that Mohale was erroneously registered as a medical intern yet he did
not have the necessary qualifications to register. “As soon as the anomaly was
spotted, Mohale was deregistered or discontinued so as to protect the public
from being attended to by an unqualified doctor, who is more than an
undergraduate medical student,” submitted Dr Dissanyake.
She stated that medical internship was a term used to describe a physician in
training who had completed medical school and had a degree, but was not yet
fully licensed to practise unsupervised. She highlighted that a medical intern
had access to patients and could attend to patients under supervision.
The registrar averred that for Mohale to graduate, he had to do student
internship programme under the direct supervision of the academic staff
monitoring of his medical school in China.
She said Mohale had to be attached to a ‘teaching hospital’ with supervisory
academic staff monitoring his progress and assessing him. “Mbabane Government
Hospital is not a ‘teaching hospital’,” submitted Dr Dissanayake.