Recently, over the past couple of months, there have been a lot of issues regarding doctors in our country.

A more recent issue is the bringing back of 60 foreign-trained doctors to occupy academic positions in our local universities. For those of you who may not be aware, our local universities provide programmes for doctors to specialise and sub-specialise.

These seats are very few and precious as in each discipline, there are maybe six to 10 seats available yearly. With the huge number of doctors applying, you can be sure the number of those rejected would be very high.

By bringing in foreign-trained doctors to occupy these seats, the government would be denying local doctors these precious seats. The people who instead will be benefitting are those who never intended to return home after studying medicine overseas.

Why is the Health Ministry giving the impression that overseas-trained doctors are better than local ones? And why are they picked over local serving doctors to occupy these academic positions?

The only reason that our foreign-trained doctors are coming home now is because they are unable to renew their work permits under the new legislation and labour laws that have been introduced in the UK.

I think the Health Ministry should sit back and reflect on the fact that it is better to reward our own local-trained doctors than to pander to those who are only thinking of themselves and who are only coming back because they can't get better offers elsewhere.