Privitisation compromises medical standards

The Medical Industry and Substandard doctors

Your front page reports “Excuse me doc,do you know what you are doing? (NST, Feb1) and medical colleges churning out substandard doctors may be shocking to many but to those in the medical profession, it is nothing unexpected. These facts were revealed by none other than the Director General of Health,Datuk Dr.Ismail Marican himself.

Gauging by the speed at which we were privatizing our medical and health services it is no surprise that we are producing not only substandard doctors and nurses but also suboptimal medical services to our patients in both government and private hospitals. The privatization has produced a lucrative medical industry for the advantage of business entrepreneurs.

We have many modern teaching hospitals and with the latest state of the art equipment but the skills of our doctors and medical staff are rapidly depleting 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 caliber foreign expertise to train our own doctors. We are just interested in quantity to fulfill the lecturer student ratio without considering 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 own medical students.

Our premier medical schools were doing just that until this the privatization policy was introduced.. Dedicated and quality doctors and specialists were shown the exit to “greener pastures”, many 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, similar to what we call disuse atrophy in medicine. I’m sure Datuk Ismail Marican will bear testimony to this.

Meanwhile numerous private medical schools with hardly any resources have sprung up all over country to take advantage of the increased demand to do medicine. Quick profits were reaped from poor parents some of whom spent all their life savings with the hope to create doctors of their children.

The medical profession, once renowned for its nobility, is being mutilated by big business co operations to reap huge profits from medical education and the provision of medical care to patients, which ideally should be provided freely by any caring government.

Dr.Chris Anthony