By Dr Musa Mohd Nordin and Dr Azizi Omar
We suspect the housemen imbroglio has been a sizzling hot topic of conversation in the many coffee rooms or chat groups of doctors. We can attest that the exchanges in our doctor’s whatsapp group has been very volatile, even diametrically opposite but undoubtedly soul searching.
We were first dumbstruck over the scandalous allegation by the Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) Malacca chapter president and deputy dean of Melaka Manipal Medical College, Dr M Nachiappan, in a report by The Star dated Nov 9, 2015, in which he claimed that some 1,000 medical graduates were not keen on continuing to be doctors after completing their housemanship due to the poor command of the English language, among other reasons.
This simplistic and ill-thought analysis of the attrition of housemen from the health service, is not the first of its kind and neither will it be the last.
This is the subtle manifestation of a colonial and Anglophile mindset that needs to be liberated. It also manifests a racial innuendo that is highly disturbing.
Our Malay, Chinese and Indian colleagues have a language handicap largely because many of us come from home environments where English is not the spoken language. It is utterly shameful that after nearly 60 years of independence, some see this handicap as an object for abuse and ridicule.
This allegation is yet another medical blame game, which first found it’s roots around the time Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) initiated its medical programme in 1972. Even before UKM graduated its pioneer batch of doctors, there was much skepticism about the quality of the doctors who had been mainly trained in the national language.
Fast forward 40 odd years, and the skeptics have been proven miserably wrong. Many of the nation’s top medical consultants and researchers are the proud alumni of the UKM medical fraternity.
And since when was medical acumen and competency directly correlated to the mastery of the English language? We graduated from the UK and Australia, and could easily discern that our “Mat Salleh” colleagues were not infrequently beating around the bush with their linguistic prowess, attempting to address a clinical situation, but obviously void of substance.
Besides, the Europeans outside the British isles do not give a hoot to the English language and neither do the Japanese and Koreans but have nonetheless excelled in their medicine. And mind you, their English is even more atrocious than that of our local graduates.
Dr Musa Mohd Nordin and Dr Azizi Omar are consultant paediatricians with the Damansara Specialist Hospital.
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