The DAP vice-chairman today said the health ministry has not been able to come up with effective short-term and long-term solutions to resolve these problems.
“Why do we have a situation of oversupply of doctors? Who will accept responsibility that we just should not have allowed the mushrooming of medical colleges?” he said in a statement.
He said he had mentioned in Parliament about 10 years ago that a situation of oversupply of doctors would result if approvals for new medical colleges and the ensuing production of doctors were not controlled.
“The health ministry said I was out of tune and we needed many more doctors. Statistics were thrown at us to show how shallow and wrong our arguments were,” he said.
“But now we are in a ‘lose-lose’ situation. Will the oversupply be addressed? Has the government the will power to address this issue?”
Kulasegaran also took the ministry’s deputy director-general Dr S Jeyaindran to task for reportedly claiming that local graduates only need to wait an average of three months for housemanship posting.
“How could we expect the health ministry to resolve this serious problem faced by medical graduates when even the deputy director-general could be so wrong in his claim?” he said.
On May 30, Jeyaindran was quoted by The Star as saying that graduates of local universities who need to undergo housemanship training would have to wait an average of only three months.
He also said the situation was “manageable” as the ministry could absorb up to 5,300 new housemen every year for its facilities nationwide.
Two days later, a houseman who wished to remain anonymous was reported by FMT as commenting that the assertion was “utter nonsense”.
She said she had to wait 11 months before getting an offer, and was among the lucky ones as many of her friends who had also graduated were still waiting to be assigned.
She said medical graduates of three local universities conducted a survey after the intake list was released and found that only about 50% of graduates from each university were absorbed into the system.
“The ones that didn’t get posted called up the PSC (Public Service Commission) to ask why. After multiple phone calls, the PSC finally admitted that the management might have made random choices instead of going by ranking,” she said.
In a letter published in The Star on Friday, a local medical graduate in Subang Jaya said his friends who graduated about the same time as him in October 2016 from Universiti Malaya began their housemanship only the week before, after waiting seven months.
The graduate said he was not that fortunate and will have to wait for the next intake, which would mean a wait of about a year after graduation.
He added that graduates are subjected to “ridiculous” non-standardised interviews, such as being asked if they follow the health minister and director-general on Facebook, with the “results” of such interviews being used to rank them and determine their intake.
Kulasegaran said Jeyaindran should withdraw his claim or prove with facts that local medical graduates only have to wait an average of three months.
Ministry’s claim about houseman training dismissed as nonsense