Health privatisation to blame for present ills
The recent revelation by director-general of health Dr Ismail Merican that our new doctors are lacking in clinical skills and that medical colleges are churning out sub-standard doctors may be shocking to many but to those in the medical profession, it is nothing unexpected.
Gauging by the speed at which we were privatising our medical and health services, it is no surprise that we are producing not only sub-standard doctors and nurses but also providing sub-optimal medical services to our patients in both government and private hospitals. The privatisation has produced a lucrative medical industry for the advantage of business entrepreneurs.
We have many modern teaching hospitals with the latest state-of-the-art equipment but the skills of our doctors and medical staff have been rapidly diminishing over the years.
We have many institutions of higher learning and medical schools but insufficient quality teachers of our own. We desperately depend on low-calibre foreign expertise to train our potential doctors. We are just interested in quantity to fulfill the lecturer-student ratio without caring much about the quality.
All we need is a handful of quality public medical schools staffed with our own experts who are fully committed and dedicated to the training of our medical students. Our premier medical schools were doing just that until this privatisation policy was introduced.
Dedicated and quality doctors and specialists were shown the exit to "greener pastures", many among them, dedicated doctors and teachers, leaving rather reluctantly.
In the private sector, they were reduced to mere businessmen doctors, slowly but surely losing the hard acquired clinical skills and experience. These doctors if retained in government service would be a great asset to the nation.
Meanwhile, numerous private medical schools with hardly any resources have sprung up all over the country to take advantage of the increased in demand for medical studies.
Quick profits were reaped from parents, some of whom spend all their life savings with the hope that their children will become doctors.
The medical profession, once renowned for its nobility, is being mutilated by big businesses to reap huge profits from medical education and the provision of medical care to patients, which ideally should be provided affordably by any caring government.
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