Yesterday, Health Minister Datuk Subramanian said that the country has 33 medical schools and many Malaysians also go overseas to study medicine and the number of doctors entering the market is now about 5000 each year.
He also reiterated that the Government would not allow any more medical school so as to be up here or even for the existing schools to increase their intake of medical students.
The government has actually realized that the nation has been facing the problem of oversupply of doctors and has in 2010 decided on a 5 year moratorium on new medical courses.
But the moratorium was made too late and the government must still resolve the two issues at hand today, the large annual supply of doctors and the quality of future doctors.
In August last year, Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) president Datuk Dr N.K.S. Tharmaseelan said that doctors will go jobless this year because there are not enough training hospitals to train the large number of medical graduates being churned out.
He called on the government to build more hospitals, increase the number of beds in existing ones and equip the district hospitals with training facilities to accommodate the influx of aspiring doctors.
Many parents, present and prospective medical students are eager to know whether doctors will go jobless and if true, what are the measures that the government will embark on.
But so far, the Government has not given sufficient answers to the issue.
In November last year, The Health Ministry’s deputy director general of health ( medical) Datuk Dr Jeyaindran Sinnadurai said that he did not forsee medical graduates becoming jobless in the near future, despite the fears expressed by the MMA.
He was also quoted as saying “Admittedly, there will come a time when they have to wait a while to find suitable training posts. They will not get a vacancy straight away. They’ll have to apply and wait their turn. It is a worldwide phenomenon”.
Was he just putting in a different way that there will come a time when doctors will be jobless?
The oversupply of doctors has also caused worry about the quality of future doctors as housemen are seeing fewer patients today.
Dr Jeyaindran also said that when he was a house officer in the early 1980s, it used to be a 1:20 patients ratio. While the original ministry quota was 1:14, today it’s 1:3 patients. Other countries, such as Singapore have a ratio of 1:8 while in the United Kingdom it is 1:12.
Health Minister should therefore reveal what are his Ministry’s long and short term measures to address the twin issues of oversupply of doctors and quality of future doctors.