Doctors attend training at Juba Teaching Hospital (Photo: courtsey)

At least 120 medical doctors began sitting for professional licensing examinations on Monday, according to the South Sudan Medical Council.

Rose Ajak, the Council Chairperson, said the candidates have undergone 19 months of post-medical school training at various teaching hospitals across the country.

The doctors are required to pass the exams before they can be licensed to practice medicine in South Sudan.

“When they finish their training in the medical schools, they go through training for almost 19 months in different hospitals, Teaching hospitals. And then after finishing that training, they have to take these exams. It is after passing these exams that they are licensed to be medical doctors,” Ajak told SSBC on Sunday.

She appealed to the National Ministry of Health to provide support and employment for the successful candidates to ensure delivery of essential healthcare services in the states.

“We are calling upon the National Minister of Health that when these people, when they finish the exams, that they get the necessary support and employment so that they go down there to the states to deliver the needed services to our communities outside,” she said.

Dr. Antony Lupai, the Director General of Juba Teaching Hospital, said the training program is designed to bridge theoretical knowledge with practical hospital experience to prepare the doctors for real-world medical challenges.

“This training that we had done was to have the integration between the clinical information they received in the colleges, in the universities, and the practical things that they are going to get on the patients in the hospitals. We made sure that they could at least be in the position of caring, emergencies that they are going to attend to,” Dr. Lupai explained.

The licensing exams are overseen by the South Sudan General Medical Council, an independent regulatory body responsible for the registration and regulation of medical, dental, and pharmaceutical professionals in the country.

In a similar exercise held in November last year, the council administered the licensing exams to 120 health professionals, including 95 doctors, 24 pharmacists, and one dentist.