Fears new law could cause mass exodus of doctors from Egypt
Fears new law could cause mass exodus of doctors from Egypt
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Medical professionals say the real issue is underfunding. Cairo’s hospitals are facing a crisis, and a new law is set to make it even worse. Underfunded and overburdened, doctors are making difficult choices, often forced to rely on their clinical judgment in the absence of functioning equipment.
![[An Egyptian doctor makes a test during an unprecedented campaign that aims to test 50 million people to detect and treat hepatitis C patients in a bid to eliminate the disease by 2022, in Cairo, Egypt]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/24/13/SEI237129892.jpg)
And now the whole of Egypt could face a doctor exodus. Late at night in a Cairo public hospital, a young doctor treating a patient in severe pain found the CT scanner was broken, so relying on his clinical judgment alone, he performed an emergency appendectomy.
“It was a calculated risk,” he said. “But under the new malpractice law ...I wouldn’t have taken that chance. I would have discharged the patient and waited for him to seek a CT scan elsewhere - even if it meant the patient’s appendix ruptured.”.
This scenario, recounted anonymously, underscores the fears many Egyptian doctors have voiced over a draft medical malpractice law that intends to address patients’ complaints about poor treatment by imposing punitive measures, including fines and the detention of doctors who give substandard care.
However, medical professionals say the real issue is underfunding and inefficiency in Egypt’s healthcare system and that the malpractice law could harm an already strained system by driving doctors abroad or out of the profession entirely. “The quality of Egypt’s healthcare system has been declining over decades,” said Hisham Ezzat, an anesthesiologist who is now practising in Germany.
