Wee Ka Siong posted on his facebook that after yesterday’s Cabinet Meeting, he together with the Minister of Health met with Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin and Second Education Minister Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh to discuss declining intake of medical students in public universities. With the effort, he hoped to increase more places for deserving students aspiring to be medical professionals.
However, increasing the place in public universities alone is simply not sufficient to solve the current issue.
On Aug 19, New Straits Times reported that Deputy Education Minister Kamlanathan said that places available for a medical degree in public varsities this year was reduced to 418, as there were housemen in hospitals with no work to do.
So if we are going to increase the place at public varsities to accommodate the deserving students aspiring to be medical professionals, how do we ensure that all the housemen are adequately trained?
So the first we need to ask ourselves is, do we have oversupply of doctor in Malaysia? The answer is “No”.
According to the “World Development Indicators: Health Systems” provided by the World Bank, the average “Physicians per 1000 people” ratio is 1.5, while the average for upper middle income nations is 1.8. As for Malaysia, the ratio is only 1.2.
Not only that, the average “hospital beds per 1000 people” ratio for upper middle income nations is 3.4 while the ratio for Malaysia is only 1.9.
Also, 3.9% of our GDP is spent for health expenditure, but the average for upper middle income nations is 6.2% of their GDP.
So it is evident that we need more doctors and hospitals. But the lack of co-ordination between Education Ministry and Health Ministry leads us to where we are now. Currently there are 11 public universities that offer medical degree and the total number of medical students is 7,271. However, there are 22 private medical institutions in our country and the total number of medical students at private institutions was 10,558.
The Education Ministry should not have allowed medical colleges to mushroom without considering the Health Ministry’s needs in the first place. Therefore by merely increasing the intake in public varsities will not solve the problem as we need to ensure the students have adequate training at a later stage.