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Why are JPA medical scholars working for foreign countries?

LETTER | I refer to the letter Medical graduates overseas defaulting on JPA scholarships.

We are indeed seeing Malaysia losing another batch of JPA sponsored medical graduates to developed nations like the UK and Australia as they graduate this year end.

Every year around this time, medical internships are offered to the best qualified international medical graduates of which a large number of them are our crème de la crème scholars who are studying in prestigious universities under JPA scholarships.

Isn’t it ironical when our JPA scholarship programme has, in fact, exported these talented people instead of offering them immediate jobs to retain them?

While the government is proactively chasing local graduates for their PTPTN student loans, what happens to these overseas medical graduates who “went off the radar” and absconded to serve another country?

This significant governmental loss in human capital development investment is often not accounted for, unlike the RM39 billion PTPTN debt which has been publicised in the media lately.

One cannot deny that the government spent a hefty amount of at least RM1 million to train each of these medical graduates overseas. On the one hand, scholarship holders today are getting bold and ungrateful.

When they were offered scholarships to further their studies, many accepted the scholarships without much hesitation and were very proud to be scholars among their peers. When they graduated, in fact, many do not have the intention of coming home to serve their country.

If only JPA can take more proactive measures and stringent actions against these scholarship defaulters, Malaysia could have retained all these brilliant students which other countries are eyeing to have so much.

If JPA had recognised these students’ excellence by offering them a scholarship to study overseas, it also has to be JPA’s duty to retain this brilliant pool in Malaysia upon graduation.

Housemanship applications for JPA scholars should be fast-tracked to prevent these medical graduates from getting job postings elsewhere. In fact, job postings should be offered to them during their final year of studies.

JPA recognised their brilliance and paid for their exorbitant tuition fees overseas and the people of Malaysia need this crème de la crème to start work immediately upon graduation and not serve another country or sit aimlessly at home.

JPA scholars must be given a posting as soon as possible so that they can continue to further into masters programme and sub-specialisation and ultimately serve the people of Malaysia effectively. Why bother to sponsor them if there are no jobs for them?


The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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