So, here you are! I remember quite some time ago that I did mention about this issue in my blog. I remember saying that what Najib had promised 1 year ago that all top scorers will be given JPA scholarship remain to be seen. And now he is saying that he never promised that all will get scholarship to do degree courses and overseas courses. Personally I know that it will never happen as there is always a quota system to follow, no matter what 1Malaysia crap that Najib talks about. Of course most of the complains seem to be coming from the non-bumiputeras compared to bumiputeras. This is simply because most of the bumiputeras who do well are in MARA colleges and boarding schools and will almost always receive either JPA or MARA sponsorship. I also feel that JPA and MARA should stop giving scholarship to SPM leavers. Everyone should do STPM, Matriculation or A-Levels before even applying for scholarship. Only after these Pre-U courses, a student should be assessed for scholarship. I had seen many who did well in SPM but flopped in STPM/A Levels. In fact, looking at our standards of SPM exams now, I doubt the quality of the As!
On another note, I still feel that JPA and MARA should stop sending students to overseas. The government seems to be promoting Malaysia as an education hub etc etc and talking about world-class education but at the same time sending all our top students to overseas universities. Does this make any sense? Only in boleh land! Most countries DO NOT send their top students overseas. They keep them in local universities and make their local universities world-class.
PM: Govt did not promise overseas scholarships to all top students
KUALA LUMPUR: While the Government promises scholarships for all top students, not everyone will be sent overseas, said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak.He said the Government was committed to giving Public Service Department (PSD) scholarships to SPM students with results of 8A+ and better.“We didn’t promise that everyone will get overseas scholarships. This is what the public did not understand,” he told reporters here yesterday.Najib said students given scholarships for diploma and matriculation courses were still eligible for degree-level scholarships.“We will guarantee to sponsor students with a degree scholarship. Some people misunderstand that the sponsorship will stop at the diploma level and not be extended further,” he said, adding that the scholarship issue had been discussed with various groups, including MCA, MIC and Gerakan.http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1
In a statement, PSD said students were chosen according to criteria approved by the Cabinet in 2009 and agreed to last year.
It said it had received 16,900 applications this year.
It said due to limited places and competition, candidates unsuccessful for overseas scholarships were offered courses in local varsities.
The department said 58.8% of overseas scholarships were granted to Bumiputra students while the rest were for non-Bumiputras.
Najib also said the Government would study the National Economic Council report on the electricity tariff review.
On reports that the increase had already been decided, he said: “We will see first. I cannot say anything.”
Najib said the subsidy rationalisation study was not about reducing subsidies but about reducing its rate of increase.
“The subsidies are increasing from the current RM12bil to some RM20bil. This means we have to find an estimated RM8bil, which is not a small sum,” he added.
Pagalavan's Avatar 
I don’t know about what the PM said or didn’t say, but I do agree that not all top students should be given overseas scholarships. They should be given scholarships but not necessarily overseas. Only for niche courses that cannot be done to a near-equivalent standard in Malaysia should sponsored students be sent overseas.
As for medicine (which seems to be what all the top-scorers want to do these days), just stop sponsoring students altogether! Why should we still sponsor students when there is a glut …. it makes no sense! We are actually doing these top-scorers and the public a disservice by continuing to sponsor students to do medicine – there are no jobs!
A friend of mine left the govt-service for overseas after just 4 months of working in a hospital in the Klang Valley. Her department had 100 house officers. She said about 20 regularly did the work and the other 80 would just hang around, go home or waste their time. There was not enough work to go around and many were just happy to collect their paycheck and go home. The logbooks that they carry are a joke – people just copy the details from others.
I asked her specifically about grads from Ukraine/Russia/Indonesia etc – are the stories true? Apparently 3/4 of them are incompetent with no desire to learn but the other 1/4 were good. Usually, the ones who did well in SPM but couldn’t afford to go anywhere else are the ones who were willing to learn. The other 3/4 basically had poor SPM results, went to medical schools where they did not learn enough to be competent, and now can get away with it because there are enough other people in the system to do the work for them.
This generation of house officers will soon become MOs and will form the majority of MOs in the public system. If they leave the public system, they will enter private practice as a GP because the govt does not want to make some sort of GP/family medicine qualification a prerequisite. Either way, we will be left with a whole bunch incompetent personnel in the system – hospitals and the GP network. The politicians don’t seem to care – they send all their family members to private hospitals.
What is the point of putting a 5-year moratorium on new medical schools when the govt is still sending 1,000 students a year to Egypt, let alone all the other medical schools in Eastern Europe and the developing world.
There is a slow increase of news about the medical glut in the mainstream media but I still think not enough attention is being given to it. There will come a point when the govt will stop hiring new HOs unless they are sponsored by MARA and JPA. The vast majority of non-sponsored students are non-Bumi and they and their parents will undoubtedly cry ‘racism’ which means the govt gives in and we’re back to square one or they stick to their guns and endure the accusations (unfairly in this case). The MQE will not work because many govt-sponsored students from Egypt/Eastern Europe/Indonesia will not pass. The govt will not let that happen so either they don’t implement the MQE or they find a way to let these students pass (lots of ways to do this – happens all the time at our public unis).
Lest I be accused of complaining without providing solutions:
1. Amalgamate the smaller, newer, private medical schools with staffing issues
2. Limit the intake of each medical school based on the capacity of senior staff at their teaching hospitals
3. Fasttrack the increase of hospitals that can take in houseman. The govt has said this will increase from 35 to 55. When?
4. Ensure that there are enough specialists in these new and existing hospitals. Do this by giving incentives for people to stay (e.g. retention bonuses, transparent promotion, departmental autonomy, etc) and increasing the numbers going through the Masters programme (only 800 anually now – not enough for the 6,000 new doctors per year).
5. Raise the salary of academics in the public hospitals to help with retention. Also, make promotion more transparent and maintain standards. Hire qualified academicians from developed countries and pay tham well if need be, instead of making someone just qualified from the Skim Latihan Akademik Bumiputera, with 6 publications in crap journals, an Associate Professor.
6. Stop sponsoring students to do medicine. There is no need to now. Spend the money on increasing the quality of our public unis and upgrading our hospitals.
7. Make the diploma in family medicine a prerequisite for general practitioners
8. Carry out a needs assessment of all the departments that staff HOs and MOs – how many does each department need? Get that number for each dept and make sure it is not exceeded. Do this centrally to avoid people pulling cables to work in “easy” departments.
9. Pull people back from the district hospitals after their one year if they wish to come back. Don’t let them languish there if they don’t want to be there.
10. Kelinik kesihatan in urban centres should not be counted as district postings
11. Stop people doing 24 hour shifts on the ward or in theatre. Allocate a separate HO/MO to do the night shift 2200-0800 at stretches of 3-4 days. This will increase patient safety and allow for more rational staffing.
12. If the MQE cannot be implemented fairly, the MMC should withdraw recognition from the vast majority of overseas medical schools it currently recognises. It can retain the recognition of med schools from UK/Aus/NZ/US/Canada/Ireland/Singapore/Hong Kong and selected premier institutions from certain countries.
13. Carry out end-of-posting assessments for each house officer. This can be in the form of a short interview on clinical topics. If they cannot explain/answer basic things or talk about things in their logbook, they should be made to repeat the posting. Apparently this is supposed to happen now but almost everyone gets signed off automatically because there are not enough specialists to do this properly and most don’t want the extra hassle of failing someone.
I apologise for rambling on. It’s been a long day at work.
Hello!
In your personal opinion, where is the best training ground for Malaysian doctors today?
are you taking about undergraduate studies or housemanship?
Sorry, I actually meant for undergraduate degree.
Nav,
What you said is really true. Your solutions will work but I doubt our politicians will have the political will to implement it.
Bea,
I wonder there is any perfect training hospital in Malaysia now. In bigger hospital, you can see more variety of cases and procedures but you will be lacking of hand-on experience. This is because there are too many housemen. In contrast, you are usually allowed to perform more procedures in smaller hospital. However you may not have the opportunities to witness or assist more complicated procedures.
THe governemnt have been spending way too much to produce a general practitioner by sending JPA to oversea. Producing a doctor through local university(private – of course excluding our famous “John Hopkins”) would cost most about 250k-350k(few years back) wherease the cost would at least double if they send JPA oversea. Is there difference in quality of doctors produced?I cant comment on that but I am pretty sure doctors trained local will be more familiarize with management of diseases that are more common. With the problems of HO overload in Malaysia I don’t even see a point in training more doctors – why not concentrate on improving quality of HO training/masters.
Nav,
I agree with what you say too but it will not be possible looking at how our government is functioning. The way government sector function is Malaysia is never transparent and I doubt it will ever change. I am not familiar with the “master” system in Malaysia for specialty training but even quadrupling seats for master training will not provide enough training position for grads. With overload of HO I feel the pain of your colleague (and thats why I op to stay oversea) but I did not know that they have 80 extra HO in a single department