Hospitals in Slovenia were given green light to hire specialist doctors from countries outside EU as of Thursday, under the provisions of a new law passed by the government in order to solve the issue of a critical shortage of specialist doctors in the country’s leading hospitals.

The doctors who come to Slovenia from non-Eu countries can only stay up to a year, and they require approval by the Health Minister and a guarantee by three Slovenian medical specialists in the same field.

The emergency amendments were passed after a wave of resignations in the paediatric cardiology department at the Ljubljana University Medical Centre, which led to the temporary hiring cardiologists from Croatia, The Czech Republic, and the United States. A specialist from Israel has performed sensitive heart procedures on children and newborns for years, and sometimes the patients were sent abroad.

The Health Minister will issue work permits for doctors even in cases where they do not speak Slovenian, which is usually a condition for obtaining a work permit in the country, but only in cases when local doctors can not ensure continuous work of the departments where there are shortages, and in cases when the shortages might lead to health risks or the patients’ deaths.

Slovenian media reported, however, that loosening the restrictions for hiring foreign doctors led to displeasure among Slovenian doctors, who demanded through their trade union that the salary system for doctors and dental practitioners be exempted from the tariff scale for the public sector so that their wages and working conditions could improve.

The doctors’ union, Fides, said they had nothing against their foreign colleagues, but they do object to the far higher wages they receive.

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