First and foremost i strongly believe that when it comes to healthcare and ensuring provision of adequate and quality care to patients should not be politicise nor looked at a racial lense.
What is most important is to ensure that the issue at hand is properly diagnosed and treated for the good of the country.
Thus the issue at hand is the severe lack of specialist in particular in Cardiothoracic Surgery and thus an option was proposed to allow UiTM, who is more advanced in formulating a cardiothoracic surgery masters programme, to be opened temporarily to non- Malays before being transfered to University Malaya(UM) once their masters program is fully developed.
So it was to response to an urgent need in the country especially in providing quality care to patients rather than a challenge the special position or constitutional rights in the Federal Constitution.
The Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) has projected that by 2025, the country will be populated by 36,022,700 people and 38,062,200 by the year 2030. Based on ratios as discussed above, Malaysia therefore needs 90,057 actively practicing doctors in 2025 and 114,187 in 2030.
Out of those figures the public sector needs at least 30% of total doctors in the public sector shall be specialist doctors, that means we need around 18,912 and 23,979 specialists in the year 2025 and 2030, respectively. Based on the current pace of production, the Ministry may achieve approximately 19% of total doctors are specialist doctors by the year 2025, instead of the needed 30%.
Specifically for Cardiothoracic Surgery, we need a ratio of 1 to 500,000 in 2025 and 1 to 450,000 in year 2030. Based on current rate, we have less than 15% of the needed total of CardioThoracis surgeon by 2030, and this is very alarming.
That is why the lack of cardiothoracic specialist doctors is now at a very worrying stage. This problem has affected the country’s health care system and quality of service to patients and may get more serious if not properly addressed. Many have to wait six months to a year to get heart surgery. Worse, some even died while awaiting treatment.
That is why i strongly believe the conversation on the matter should be on solutions and avenues to address it including maximising the abilities of ALL local institutions to produce the needed specialist, including incorporating the specialist parallel programs to complement the existing numbers of specialist in our country.
So let this issue at hand pull us all together to urgently address it, rather than divide us and become a polemic. Such a problem if not addressed, will affect everyone and the disease will not differentiate the race of the patients , nor will it differentiate the race or background of the doctor treating it.