MY SAY: Whither the Hippocratic oath?

• Main Author: Abd Razak, Dzulkifli
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: HG4900-5993 By region or country
• Online Access: http://eprints.usm.my/32132/1/DZUL22.pdf; http://eprints.usm.my/32132/

The news that the government is imposing a five-year moratorium on medical programmes for a variety of reasons cannot be more timely. Malaysia is fast becoming a doctor-exporting country and one could argue that such drastic action should have been taken much earlier. By now the diagnosis seems to be much more dire. A former minister of health says Malaysia will be producing about 4,500 doctors a year come January 2011. And at this rate of growth, the number of doctors will double from the current 30,000 to 55,000 or 60,000 five or six years from now. For a long time, the justification for more medical programmes was that Malaysia had yet to meet the desired doctor to patient ratio based on internationally accepted norms. The assumption was that per cohort of some tens of thousands of people, there should be so many doctors to provide "quality" services. Ironically, one of the reasons cited for the moratorium is the quality of the new doctors.