Georgia finds its doctors wanting

Almost half of Georgia's doctors have been stripped of their medical licences after failing professional competency tests.

The Georgian health minister, Avtandil Djorbenadze, said that about 12,000 of the country's 27,000 registered practitioners had failed the tests.

Mr Djorbenadze said that the people of Georgia had grown used to doctors making wrong diagnoses or providing wrong treatment.

He said it was now time to address the poor professionalism, but that he couldn't be sure that even those doctors who had passed the test were sufficiently qualified to practise medicine.

Mr Djorbenadze suggested that one way to combat the problem would be to close many of the country's medical schools, which he described as being so bad as to be below criticism.

During Soviet times, Georgia had the highest proportion of doctors per head of population, but in recent years it has become increasingly difficult to make a living in medicine and many have turned to other ways of making a living.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service