Medical furtherance for immigration
Wojtek Ciszak M.D.
The information below will be of interest to you if, some time after your medical exam, you received a letter or email from immigration asking you to contact your panel doctor and provide more medical information.
What does it mean?
This can happen if, during your immigration medical examination, you reported a serious medical condition to the doctor, or the doctor detected such a condition, either during the examination or afterwards, when reviewing the laboratory and X-ray reports. In most cases, the Panel Physician would have already discussed this issue with you before submitting the report to the immigration medical branch, so the furtherance request is usually not a surprise.
Once the immigration medical staff receives a medical report from the Panel Physician and it contains some findings of concern, they want to make sure that the condition is not severe enough to affect your admissibility to Canada (or to Australia or New Zealand, as the case may be). Specifically, they may want to be reassured that:
- The condition does not pose a risk to others (e.g. tuberculosis).
- It will not require expensive treatment that may be a burden to the public health care system or social services. Typical concerns are organ failure, history of cancer in the past 5 years or severe disability.
What do I need to do?
You need to contact the Panel Physician's office. Although, theoretically, you can see any Panel Physician for this service, it is much better to stick with the one who performed the original examination.
A visit to the office is often not necessary and the required arrangements can usually be made by phone or email.
How much will it cost?
This depends on what is being requested by immigration. Sometimes they may request a simple additional test, or a repeat of the test you have already done. In other cases, they may require a recent specialist report. This will often involve additional expenses. If you are already receiving specialist care and have medical insurance, these additional expenses can be avoided. The panel doctor will explain these options to you.
You will also have to pay for the panel doctor's time in arranging, reviewing and submitting the additional investigations to immigration. Since this service is not a normal part of your medical care, it cannot be charged to medical insurance. The fee will depend on the amount of actual work required and cannot be exactly predicted in advance. Typically, this service takes a total of 30 - 60 minutes of the doctor's time to complete.
