KL stops hiring foreign doctors
MALAYSIA has kicked off a major revamp of its health-care sector with plans to phase out its reliance on foreign doctors and to redeploy manpower nationwide to tackle the problem of overworked hospitals and underutilised ones.
The Health Ministry has terminated the services of 22 foreign doctors, citing communication problems and incompetence as reasons, as it moves towards phasing out foreign doctors completely by 2009.
'We are not keen to continue our reliance on foreign doctors,' Health Minister Chua Soi Lek said on Friday.
The only foreign doctors still being recruited are from Myanmar as they can speak English and were trained in Britain, he said.
About RM40 million (S$18 million) is spent annually on salaries for some 730 foreign doctors from Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Myanmar and Canada.
A nationwide redeployment of doctors and nurses at 117 government hospitals is also under way.
'Deployment will be based on actual workload,' he said.
There are 11,500 doctors and 28,000 nurses in government hospitals nationwide.
Last year, 61 hospitals had a bed occupancy rate of less than 50 per cent. -- New Straits Times, The Star/Asia News Network
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