Today amendments in Parliament to Act 50 or the Medical Act 1971 is very crucial step to resolving the ongoing parallel pathway issue and addressing the critical shortage of medical specialists in our country by enabling both parallel pathways and master’s programmes to run concurrently, addressing the gap between these two routes to specialisation.
Through these amendments, the responsibility of recognition and ensuring the standards for medical specialty training in Malaysia is placed upon the Malaysian Medical Council (MMC) who will be responsible for all medical specialisation matters.
I fully welcome such amendments as it is important to give room for the medical professionals fraternity and specialist societies who knows and understands the needs and quality needed on the ground to decide the capacity and competency of those specialist on training in partnership with recognised and prestigious overseas medical establishments.
However, in order for it to achieve its aim and to strengthen our healthcare system without unintended consequences that may jeopardise quality of care, proper implementation transparent oversight and check and balance mechanism is also needed.
With such powers to MMC under this framework, the first step for proper oversight is to see reforms within MMC itself. While these amendments we see today did improve the composition of MMC itself including adding more representation of Sabah & Sarawak, but there is also need for reforms to increase transparency in the (MMC) decision-making process.
This includes greater tranparency in publishing publicly decisions made by the Medical Education Committee (MEC) including justifications and clear chronology of events in recognising or derecognising a medical qualification, be it undergraduate or postgraduate qualifications.
Postgraduate qualifications, decision, and consideration of the Specialty Subcommittees for Education (SSC-Edu) should also be made available in the public domain.
Through this, they can stay accountable and provide justifications to their decisions.
On top of that, we will need to reform the election process of the MMC, its voting system, which still uses postal ballots, is outdated and should be simplified through digitalisation, in line with the MOH’s (Ministry of Health) digital health transformation agenda.
Currently, the inconvenience to cast a ballot is discouraging the fraternity from voting with only 10 per cent voting from the close to 70,000 registered medical practitioners each time elections are held. Voting results and votes for each candidates should also be transparently published.
More importantly we must increase the composition of the MMC council to consist of at least 80 per cent elected representatives. Currently, out of the 33 MMC members, only 17 or just over half are elected, with the remaining 16 being appointed positions.
This is important as much powers have been given to members of the MMC to make important decisions, thus majority of them should be kept accountable by own fraternity through an election process.
I also suggest that there will be a representation from the Academy of Medicine Malaysia(AMM) in MMC itself to represent the voice and act as an oversight by the medical societies in the board. On top of that the top position of AMM, the ‘Master’ is also elected thus accountable to the members of these societies.
All these may be first few steps for reforms to give better oversight to ensure better outcomes and i believe that these amendments, coupled with proper implementation and oversight, will strengthen our healthcare system and benefit the nation as a whole.