Recognition of specialists: let’s stop the bickering
Everyone involved should be less emotional and more rational as lives are at stake.
From Dr RA Lingeshwaran
It has been almost three weeks since the end of the last Parliament meeting.
Many bills were debated and highlighted, but nothing has been as seismic as the future of the parallel pathway programme for trainee medical specialists.
All ministries are important, but the health ministry is arguably the most important as it deals with the lives of Malaysians.
Having been the director of a public hospital before, I worry for Malaysians if this impasse is not resolved soonest.
Suffice to say, healthcare, which is a public good, affects the lives and livelihood of all Malaysians.
There is no substitute for a robust and progressive healthcare system which continues to serve the needs of our nation as a whole.
One of the questions I raised regarding parallel pathway training has now become a national debate and a tug-of-war involving the health ministry, higher education ministry, the Malaysian Medical Council (MMC) and those who oppose it.
It has reached a stage where many individuals and groups, including those claiming to be eminent personalities, have resorted to mud-slinging.
They are jumping on the bandwagon and making senseless and factually incorrect statements from a narrow-minded perspective.
Some of their claims are almost comical, which begs questions of their much-lauded credentials.
Now, to clear the doubt once and for all, let me declare that before joining politics, I was the director of Sungai Bakap Hospital in Penang.
This qualifies me to give views from my experience in government hospitals.
I have witnessed long lists of patients needing treatment, and even longer waiting times for operations because of the lack of trained specialists, which also results in poorer outcomes for our patients due to delayed diagnosis and suboptimal treatment.
I have felt helpless many times when facing families of relatives who have lost loved ones, simply because we could not give safe and timely treatment to their fathers, mothers, or children.
I have seen the tears in the eyes of my own hospital staff as our surgeons were outnumbered by the sheer number of patients – some of whom were in pain.
Some of the surgeons were so tired after being in operating theatres for 24 hours that they just simply could not muster enough energy for another life-saving surgery.
This is the current situation in our public hospitals that many out there do not seem to realise.
As I had stressed in my debate in the Dewan Negara, we currently have about 17,000 registered specialists in the country.
However, we will need at least double or triple that number if we are to benchmark against developed countries like Singapore, Japan, the US and Australia.
According to higher education minister Zambry Abdul Kadir, the local masters programmes have only produced about 7,000 specialists since they were first introduced in the late 1970s.
Simply put, we have a severe lack of specialists in this country to give optimal and timely care.
We need to act now, and it must be fast. The longer we delay the specialist training and recognition, the more lives will be at stake.
Our existing training pathways are simply not enough to meet the rakyat’s needs.
To put it in a nutshell, the demand for specialists is high, but the production of qualified specialists in this country is low.
So, who suffers?
Well, it can be you or me, or worse still, our loved ones. As we bicker and point fingers at each other, does it actually solve the problem?
A former academic who labelled surgeons who graduated from certain countries as “haram” is being reckless.
Has he forgotten that these surgeons actually have saved so many of our loved ones while forgoing their sleep and family time?
I have an honest and humble plea. I beg for everyone involved to be less emotional and more rational as the lives of our loved ones are at stake.
We should not be thinking of a win-lose or lose-win result. Healthcare cannot be a zero-sum game.
We should be thinking of a win-win target when it comes to healthcare. If local masters programmes need help to meet the trainer-to-trainee ratio, let’s join hands to make sure we max out their training capacity.
If the standards and quality of the parallel pathway programme are in question, let’s help to ensure that it is run with quality at set standards to augment the production of the much-needed number of specialists in the country.
We need to synergise, not antagonise. Let’s stop the bickering! Let’s augment the national masters programme and help to expand its training capacity. Let us also recognise the parallel pathway programmes which are sanctioned by world-renowned colleges.
If there are any questions about their quality, why not we put up additional mechanisms to safeguard the quality of our specialists? Let us get the best healthcare delivered in a safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and patient-centric manner for our rakyat.
I love Malaysia, and I earnestly do not wish to see more lives lost due to the lack of specialists in our beloved country.
Dr RA Lingeshwaran is a senator and a former public hospital director.
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