Medical Exams for Children and Dependants: Why the School Holidays Matter
Four kids, one waiting room, one Tuesday morning. That’s the scene nobody pictures when they read the line in the application guide that says family members must also be examined. It doesn’t say “the ones coming with you.” It says family members.
Somebody has to physically get every child into a chair in front of a panel physician, and that makes medical exams for children and dependants one of the few parts of a Canadian permanent residence application that can’t be done piecemeal, from a laptop, at 11pm after the kids are in bed. For a family of five, it’s the hardest logistics problem in the whole file.
Everyone listed, including those staying behind
IRCC’s own instruction is blunt about this: family members must be examined even if they’re not coming to Canada with you. The rule is that every family member must be examined, so a child staying with grandparents in Durban while the rest of the family lands in Calgary still needs the exam. So does a dependant who isn’t included in the eventual move at all, as long as they’re listed as a family member on the application. This catches people who assumed the medical only applies to bodies that will be on the plane.
Only an IRCC-approved panel physician can do it — not your GP, the school nurse, or a doctor who happens to have “immigration medical” on a signboard. The results are good for 12 months. Do it too early in a slow-moving application and you may be paying for a second round later, at everyone’s expense rather than just one child’s.
What it costs, and where the age split actually shows up
We can’t confirm from our research whether the medical tests themselves differ by a child’s age — that’s worth asking the panel physician’s office directly when you book, since children have their own developmental checks. What we can confirm is that fees do scale by age. IOM South Africa’s Canadian medical clinic in Pretoria, one of the country’s Canada-approved panel practices, charges R1,300 for a child under 11, R2,000 for ages 11 to 15, and R2,600 for 15 and older, paid by EFT in advance. For a family with children spread across those bands, that’s three different line items on the same invoice, not one number multiplied by however many kids you have.
Beyond that clinic, the full list of approved panel physicians in South Africa is something IRCC only publishes through its own search tool rather than as a static list — old directories that circulate online can be years out of date, so it’s worth checking the current tool rather than trusting a name a friend used in 2022.
Getting four children through one appointment day
This is where the December and January school holidays earn their keep. A panel physician’s office booking four or five separate slots is easier to coordinate when nobody has to be pulled out of class, and when both parents are actually free to split the queue — one adult per two children tends to be the workable ratio once you’ve sat in the waiting room with a bored eight-year-old for forty minutes.
Book the appointments together where the clinic allows it, confirm in advance whether siblings can be seen back-to-back rather than on different days, and bring every child’s documentation separately — each exam is logged individually, even if you’re paying and waiting as one family unit.
None of this is complicated. It’s just five separate small tasks disguised as one line item on a checklist, and the families who plan the day around it, rather than around the invoice, tend to get through it with fewer tears.
Our free guides walk through the fuller Express Entry document set, including where the medical exam sits in the overall timeline — a useful check before you start booking anything.