I wish to voice my opinion that the Public Services Department should stop sending students to European or American universities for medical courses. I understand that each of these students cost the government (taxpayers' money) almost RM1million ringgit each.

Currently, Malaysia has so many (almost 17) public or private medical schools. Thus, producing doctors with basic degrees is not really a problem. In fact, the current sitution in Malaysia is 'mass production' of such doctors. Thus, there is actually no more need to send our student overseas to pursue medical courses.

If the JPA want to send students for medical courses, they should seriously consider sending these students to countries like India, Indonesia or Russia (or even to our own private medical colleges) where the tuition fees are much lower and the quality more or less the same. In fact, for each student sent to an European or American university, we can probably send five or six students to these other countries.

In Malaysia, we have no problem with producing doctors with basic degrees. We should spend the money by sending our doctors for subspecialty training or specialties such as oncology, haemotology, plastic surgery, cardiology, cardiothoracic surgery, urogynaecology etc all fields which are seriously lacking in Malaysia.

Spending RM1 million to produce doctors without basic degrees is not justified or cost effective. For each miliion riggit, we can send three or four doctors for subspecialty training which is more urgently needed in this country. If we can have more specialists or subspecialists, then these are the doctors who have better knowledge and skill to improve our level of our healthcare and can even, in turn, train more of our doctors to improve their skills.

We are no more in the era of the 50s. In this 21st century, we need more specialists with advanced skills - not normal (and expensively-trained) doctors which are already flooding the market.