As you may or may not know, health care in Norway is (almost) free. Yes, I know this is hard to believe for most people. Norway was originally supposed to be included in the Michael Moore movie ‘Sicko‘ on the workings/failing of health care systems on this planet, but he decided to take it out because the system has several similarities with the French health care system, and some parts just sounded too good to be true…
Some examples: Any treatment & examinations connected to a pregnancy are 100% free. From the very first check until the delivery: no cost at all! (and after the birth, a year of maternity leave for the mother, and a minimum of 6 weeks for the father!).
Norwegian patients treated for an illness like psoriasis or rheumatism are eligible for two weeks paid vacation at a spa in the Canary Islands. Norway hires a government ethicist to determine who they should spend their money on, because they want to do it in an ethical way.

Well, today it was my turn to experience the ‘free’ health care system in Norway.
Free is not 100% accurate since doctors do charge for their consults (NOK 160, US$ 29), and you are charged for your medication, but there is a max. of NOK 1740 (about US$315) a year. (I am not sure whether this amount is the same for all, or whether it’s based on your income…) If my health care expenses were to be more than that, the government would pick up the tab.

I went to see the doctor to have my ears checked (yes, I am herewith admitting I have a selective hearing)
I arrived at 1:40pm, right on time for my 1:45pm appointment. Or so I thought…
The waiting room was quite full, but since it’s a collective office of 3 doctors, I wasn’t too worried. I had to wait until 2:30pm until it was eventually my turn. That 45 mins. wait wasn’t too bad compared to some of the stories I heard in the waiting room of people who had to wait 3-4 hours on previous visits…!
Now I do not know how it is nowadays in the Netherlands (where I grew up), but when I was young (25 years ago) I hardly ever had to wait. Every time I had a doctors appointment the doctor was all mine on the scheduled time. But perhaps this has changed as well…
Anyway… After the wait I was welcomed by my doctor to whom I explained why I was there. One of his first questions was whether I had had this specific problem before. That question proved to me that he had not looked at my medical records, because then he would have seen that my last visit to him, a couple of years ago, was for exactly the same reason as today’s visit…!
After a quick but thorough check I was handed off to a nurse/assistant (no waiting time there) who would carry out some ‘ear maintenance’. Even though the doctor told her that my left ear was a lot worse than my right ear, she decided to do my right ear first. Perhaps because it was on her left side?
But I shouldn’t be complaining about the order in which she did my ears, since the result was the same: my hearing is back to 100% (well, I guess not 100%… not many 35-year olds still have 100% hearing…)
She then handed me a test kit and parked me in the examining room of the doctor where I was to wait until he was done with the patient he was taking care of in the mean time. In those 5 minutes I had time to check out the test kit I was given. It turned out to be a FOBT! My first thought was… yup, you guessed it… SHIT!
My second thought of course was that it must be a mistake… Which it turned out to be, when I asked the doctor. He said that he probably ‘pressed a wrong key’. Can I conclude from this that all Norwegian doctors have a dedicated poop-test key on their keyboards?
So I returned him the test kit and he did another thorough check of my hearing to make sure the nurse/assistant had done her job well (which she had).
Then he gave me a green card on which the doctors keep track of charges, in this case my NOK 160 for the medical consult, so that when I hit the NOK 1740 I do not have to pay more than that. I paid the man, and left.
However… when I got home, I took a closer look at the card. The amount on it was correct, but not the name! And not just misspelled, but my card contained the name and the fødselsnummer (birth number, a national identification number) of someone else! A serious blooper, since these national identification numbers are supposed to be kept confidential. I just hope he did not give some complete stranger a green card with my number on it… :-/

All in all, a first-class experience, with some (computer-related?) bloopers that could have been prevented.
I’m not writing this entry to put down the Norwegian health care system. I probably have a doctor who either has too many patients, or just had an off-day. I mean, it could have been worse… If he’d told the nurse/assistant to do a rectal exam instead of handing me a test kit!

Yup, that’s me!

Well, at least if I base it on the job offers I receive via email: 2-3 each month. Not bad for someone who isn’t actively looking for a job in the first place…

In Norway there are more job vacancies than there are unemployed people, and the IT sector is one of the worst: many job openings, and no one to fill them.
So what to do when your task is to find a new IT person for a job opening which your company has? First of all you contact NAV, the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Organisation, one of their departments being the National Employment Service. If they can’t help you, you place some ads on sites like Finn & Monster. If that still does not give you any suitable candidates, you start searching online for people who are perhaps not unemployed, but who may still be interested in coming to work for your company.

The fact that I get several serious job offers each month seems to indicate that many companies have to resort to this last option. Especially in Oslo there are quite a few companies who have come across my resume and would consider me an asset to their workforce.
However, so far none of those companies has made me ‘an offer I can’t refuse‘ yet so I’m still happily working in Moss at my current employer.
Some have gone as far as offering me 30-40% more salary than I make at my current job. A tempting offer, of course… However, a job in Oslo would mean I’d have to get up even earlier than I already do (I get up at 6am on workdays) and returning home later (currently about 5pm). Is a vast increase in salary worth leaving the house early, early in the morning, and not returning until it’s evening? Not for me…

So what would a company have to offer me for me to switch jobs, you ask? Well… That is a question I’ve been asking myself as well, and I do not have an answer (yet)…

This is a conclusion mentioned in an article on the Norwegian web site digi.no about new research carried out by Oxford Research on behalf of the Norwegian Ministry of Labour and Social Inclusion and NHO.

Norwegian companies have a great need for qualified IT personnel, and Norway is not able to cover this need. Companies have tried for several years to attract IT people from abroad, but that is not easy. Bureaucratic rules cause up to 6 months delay while applications are being dealt with at the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI).

Because of this Norway is in danger of losing good IT personnel, even though the need is greater than ever before. The secretary general of ICT Norway, Per Morten Hoff, estimates that Norway will need 10 000 foreign IT experts in 2008.

The research carried out by Oxford Research confirms that higher educated immigrants have a hard time with cooping with the Norwegian society.

‘We have discovered a considerable gap between the expectations and the actual experiences’, according to CEO Harald Furre of Oxford Research to the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.

Lacking information in English makes it hard for foreigners to establish themselves. When one has just arrived in Norway it is necessary to establish an internet connection, a bank account, a doctor, school and perhaps kindergarten. But when information is not available in English, this is not an easy task.

The research determines that it is necessary to establish more openness, more English, empty slots in international schools, shorter processing times of work and residence visa, and better information on cultural activities.

Per Morten Hoff now hopes that the so-called ‘Blue Card‘ of the EU will help out. This card will give the head of personnel in an IT company the chance to approve a work permit request from an IT expert from, for example the Ukraine. This will shorten the long waiting period at the UDI. At the same time it becomes the responsibility of the company to make sure they get the skills they request. If they get someone who doesn’t know anything about SAP, then it is useless to complain to other instances.

Hoff mentioned to digi.no that Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion Bjarne Håkon Hansen wants to introduce the system in 2008. Other EU countries already have good experiences from the system, that became operational in the end of October 2007.

‘It is clear that a head of personnel of IBM will have greater expectations & requirements to find the right IT skills than a employee of UDI’, states Hoff to digi.no.