Undergoing Health Examination - The Whole Story

It was almost a month since I made the payment for the visa application. The time was up for the next task on the list – going ahead with health examination. Many people online suggested to go for medicals once the CO is assigned but I didn’t want to wait that long. Besides, looking at the timeline and historical trend, I had only one month more till the CO was assigned. Of course, I was being optimistic, it could have very well taken more time than that. Thankfully it didn’t but more about that later.

Getting HAP ID and eMedical Referral Letters

Actually there is good reason why you should delay medicals and PCC until asked by CO. It’s because the earlier of the two will be your last entry date for visa. So if you do medicals on 15/07/2016, PCC on 18/08/2016 and got your visa on 01/09/2016, your last date of entry on the visa will be 15/07/2017, not 01/09/2017 as you may expect. Now logically all that makes sense. However after reading about few terrible experiences, especially regarding Indian PCC, I decided to finish both of them as early as possible.

Before you can go for health examination, you need to get eMedical referral letters for all the applicants. Every eMedical referral letter contains HAP ID which is a unique number given to each applicant who undergoes health examination. Generating letters for all three of us was easy enough. In the immi website, I declared that I had no history of critical illnesses and downloaded the eMedical letters for the three of us.

Getting (Medically) Fit for Visa

Once the letters were printed, I checked the immi site for the list of panel physicians in my city – Pune. It was available at Ruby Hall clinic in Pune. I checked with the hospital and they assured me that I don’t need to book an appointment for health examination.

Next day, I walked into Ruby Hall with my wife and infant daughter. eMedical facility at Ruby Hall was a complete chaos. Visa applicants for all the different countries amalgamated there in a single hall. Plus, there was no system to handle the crowd, so a lot of people were running around from one counter to different in confusion.

Amidst this chaos, after turned down at few wrong counters, we were told to go to an office near radiology department. After waiting there for what seemed like forever, our turn came. I handed over the required documents – medical referral letters, passports, photocopies of passports and 2 passport size photos for all three of us – to the nurse. She verified documents, took our photos and asked us to see optometrist first for eye test.

It was quick since neither of us had glasses, but if you have you should carry prescriptions. Next we did our chest x-rays. In the meanwhile, not to aggravate my baby daughter, I got her examination done when got the chance. Thankfully it was quick. Next was complete physical examination (height, weight, blood pressure etc). Just to have some fun, my blood pressure jumped a little higher than normal. Luckily, the lady doctor there was quite considerate and assured me that it was perfectly normal.

Finally I did my blood and urine test which was quite uneventful. The whole process took nearly half the day and cost us about INR 9000. Since the hospital was going to share results directly with DIBP, all I could do was to pray that our way to Australia wouldn’t be blocked by our own bodies and move on to get PCC.

Moving To Australia Series