He said there were only about 700 family medicine specialists currently serving in public and private health facilities.

“It will take time for us. So because of that we have two parallel programmes, one is with RCSI (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland) and the other one with an Australian university. But more importantly, it is to complement our local master’s degree programme because we want the numbers.

“We are complementing the system so that we can increase the number of family medicine specialists in the country,” he told a press conference after launching a Malaysia-Ireland training programme for family medicine here today.

Noor Hisham said family medicine and primary care was a focus area of the Health Ministry.

He said the ministry would try to get scholarships for the family medicine trainees. “All of them will be trained in our centres, in our facilities. We are trying to give priority to 35 students who have already enrolled into the programme,” he said of the scholarship.

The first cohort of 35 doctors will undergo a four year training programme, that is, two years in hospital and two years in family medicine.

Noor Hisham said there are no plans to make it mandatory for doctors completing their housemanship to take up family medicine speciality courses. This will only be considered if there are enough family medicine physicians in the country.

Hisham was responding to a question if Malaysia would follow Ireland in making it mandatory for new doctors to take up specialisation courses after their internships.

He said the government wants to encourage more doctors to take postgraduate courses on family medicine by offering incentives in the form of additional pay.

RUMC president Dr David Whitford said Ireland had made it mandatory for new doctors to take up family medicine specialisation courses since 1989.

He agreed that a “critical mass” of family physicians in the market is needed before such specialisation is made mandatory in the long run.

Earlier, Hisham met the first group of 35 doctors who have enrolled for a family medicine postgraduate course under the Malaysia-Ireland Training Programme for Family Medicine at RUMC.

He and Irish ambassador Hilary Reilly jointly launched the programme, which is a partnership between the health ministry and RUMC signed last year.

The four-year course costs about RM20,000 a year.