Pharmacy grads will have jobs, minister says

Malaysian Insider: KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 14 — Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai assured unemployed pharmacy graduates today they will have jobs soon.
The health minister blamed the delay of a salary scale for civil servants under a revised government remuneration scheme for the lack of jobs.
“Lately, the bit of delay of employing our pharmacists into our system is due to the new SBPA that has been deferred,” Liow (picture) said.
He assured the new pharmacists they will be recruited as soon as possible.
Liow said the government was working to bridge the public-private healthcare divide and will soon be able to offer more jobs to new pharmacy graduates.
“To say that we don’t have enough positions to cater is not true,” Liow said, responding to recent reports highlighting pharmacy graduates who claim they have been jobless as far back as eight months ago.
“In fact we are liberalising our policy, we would like to allow our pharmacists to work either in government or private (sectors),” he told reporters following the launch of a pharmaceutical industry fact here.
He said his ministry had even liberated attachment conditions for fresh graduates and was taking in more pharmacy graduates annually.
“We are engaging and we are employing more pharmacists from year to year,” the minister said.
Liow said that previously, pharmacy graduates were required to train a year and practise another three years at public hospitals in order to obtain their practising licence. The scheme was known as one-plus-three.
However, in October last year, the three-year attachment condition was slashed to only one year, meaning pharmacy graduates only needed to train a year and practise another year to win their practising licence.
The MCA deputy president also pointed out that pharmacists were no longer limited to train in public hospitals and clinics.
“We allow pharmacists to have compulsory training in private training, not only in government sector,” he said.
“They are allowed training in pharmaceutical companies. So this is the kind of flexibility that we have introduced,” he added.
An oversupply of potential recruits coupled with a shortage of pharmacy-related positions were initially blamed for the lack of vacancies leading to disgruntlement among the new pharmacy graduates, according to media reports.
However, graduates now believe their applications for placement were unsuccessful due to the review of the New Public Service Remuneration Scheme (SBPA), which Liow acknowledged today.
He said, “It is due to the salary scale that is under review now, but we will continue to engage them at the old salary scale because the SBPA is under review now.”