Why is there so much fuss about too many doctors all of a sudden? It is mind boggling to learn that just a few years back, there was a shortage of doctors in view of our Vision 2020 in achieving a 1:400 doctor-patient ratio.

Could it be due to the fact that the public and private universities in Malaysia are mushrooming faster than us reaching Vision 2020?

Nearly 30 universities and colleges are offering medical degrees. Adding to that, there has also been an increase in the recognition of medical colleges from countries where their standards of care and teaching are much lower than us.

The public then started screaming that the quality of care is getting compromised, while senior doctors in the government service complain that it is difficult to cope up with the training of a large number of junior doctors.

Sadly, there were not many actions taken by the relevant government bodies or politicians to right the wrong in any way - instead choosing to let time correct the situation. Even now, they are only harping on the situation but have not come up with a dynamic solution to the problem.

In my opinion, we still need more undergraduate medical doctors due the patient load in public hospitals - since their health services are free to all citizens, which is a boon by itself.

At this juncture, we have achieved a relatively constant supply of undergraduate doctors for our country. At the same time, we are self-sufficient in producing our own graduates with 30 over universities - the standards of which we can monitor regularly via the relevant authorities.

Therefore, we should reduce our dependence on those with undergraduate degrees from foreign countries. Instead, we should encourage current qualified doctors to pursue postgraduate or specialist degrees in which we are facing a shortage.

I certainly believe that to get a good pyramid of higher specialisation, we need to have a good base of undergraduates - which we have almost achieved, although the quality may be a bit compromised due to the lack of availability of specialist trainers and hospitals.

Enrol in world class varsities

As we have almost achieved the number of undergraduate doctors as anticipated for Vision 2020, from now on we should concentrate on getting quality undergraduates by discouraging students from going overseas and enrolling in substandard universities there.

We should only allow students to enrol in really good and world class universities to do medicine, in case we think that we need some new ideas.

In fact, the countries that we send our students to study medicine at, do not reciprocate by sending their students to study in our country.

Besides that, we are in need of more number of specialists and sub-specialists, so we should increase the number of postgraduate specialists training in government universities and encourage capable private medical colleges to start postgraduate training - which are within their capacity and without compromising quality for quantity.

Lastly, there should be efforts to bring back the UK postgraduate degrees by conducting joint examinations and also the recognition of certain hospitals of ours as training centres to sit for these examinations.

This will increase the number of specialists, while at the same time decrease taxing the public universities of coping with too many postgraduate specialist students.