Urgent issues for Higher Education Ministry

SunDaily: I WRITE in response to “Sub-standard housemen” (Nov 8) and “Continuous efforts to improve housemanship training” (Letters, Nov 16) as a professor at a public university in Malaysia offering medical courses.
I agree that deteriorating standards among housemen are partly due to their attitude. However, a large part of the blame lies with the Higher Education Ministry and public universities. Poor attitude had existed among medical students since the early days of medical education in Malaysia. Then, they were identified and given proper guidance while still at university so that they emerged responsible doctors, because medical education then was a sort of apprenticeship. These days, the sheer number of students and the lack of suitably qualified medical lecturers make individual attention virtually impossible and the learning experience diluted.
Teaching in public universities for more than 20 years has given me a firsthand perspective of the downward spiral of the standard of medical schools in Malaysia. Many fellow lecturers who are experts in their disciplines quit universities to establish their own practices. They were replaced by recently graduated and inexperienced doctors and foreign lecturers from countries like Myanmar, Indonesia and Pakistan. In the past, specialists from the Health Ministry (MOH) would join universities as lecturers while medical officers would join as trainee lecturers. In the last two years, even local doctors have stopped joining universities as lecturers or trainee lecturers.
There are a few reasons for this, the most important being the salary inequality between doctors working in MOH hospitals and those who are lecturers in public universities. This began in March 2009 when Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced a new career pathway with time-based promotion for MOH doctors, giving them an instant increase in salary. This caused a disparity of salaries between the two categories – most marked when comparing a doctor at the MOH (RM6,731.54) with a trainee lecturer at a public university (RM4,907.57), both of the same seniority.
Another reason is the lack of transparency in the promotion of medical lecturers. Some who have worked more than 10 years are still senior lecturers while some junior lecturers have been promoted to associate professors within five years. In contrast, all MOH doctors automatically get promoted after a number of years’ service.
To rub salt into the wound, foreign lecturers at public universities are paid more than locals and most are appointed as associated professors or professors despite being less qualified. Better qualified expatriate doctors would have been appointed as lecturers in countries like the UK, US or even Singapore. A majority of foreign doctors in our public universities are those who have been unsuccessful in their applications to these countries.
In his letter, the director-general of health said the Malaysian Medical Council has set the standard in the recognition of universities offering medical programmes. However, many universities still do not meet these standards. In a recent report by the Malaysian Qualifying Agency, the university at which I currently work failed to conform to these standards.
A lack of urgency by the Higher Education Ministry in addressing these issues will have dire consequences. The next generation of doctors will no longer be the professionals we once held in high esteem. They are going to be the ones caring for us in our old age and our lives will be in their hands.

Retiring Professor
via email