Private healthcare experts: Give doctors the chance to advance

GEORGE TOWN: If the government were to allow private hospitals to sponsor doctors to be trained as specialists in medical schools and later be bonded to practise in Malaysia’s private healthcare, the country’s medical brain drain may be stemmed.

Penang Adventist Hospital (PAH) chief executive officer Ronald Koh said it would help save the country from losing bright doctors to overseas healthcare centres, public or private.

He opined that private hospitals such as PAH could sponsor medical officers working their way up to specialist fields to keep Malaysia’s medical talents.

“We only hire specialists, not medical officers, so the medical brain drain issue going on now I think will not affect us that much,” he said.

A cardiologist pointed out that doctors in public healthcare were allowed after 2016 to treat full-paying patients (FPP) for patients to benefit from specialists in public healthcare after hours.

But FPP was stopped during the pandemic and had yet to be renewed, said cardiologist Dr Shahul Hamid Ahmad Shah.

He said Malaysia’s medical brain drain had been going on for years and FPP cushioned the impact of losing specialists in public healthcare going abroad.

“We are not only losing specialist doctors. Medical officers have been lured away to Singapore, Australia, the United Kingdom and many other countries,” he said.

He said FPP was first introduced at Hospital Putrajaya and later in 10 hospitals throughout the country.

“I think the ministry has done its best and I hope it can be resumed to overcome the issue of our medical brain drain,” he said.

Penang Medical Practitioners Society president Datuk Dr Tan Kah Keong urged the government to revive the practice of meritocracy in public healthcare.

“When we don’t practise meritocracy, we will lose our best medical practitioners to other countries because we cannot give our best the platform to succeed as healthcare experts,” he said.

He said Singapore, for example, was a tertiary medical centre and a natural beacon for all highly-skilled medical professionals, Malaysia included, to lean towards.

A nephrologist since 1994, Dr Tan said he was a top student at Universiti Malaya himself and experienced first hand the lack of meritocracy in Malaysia.

“It takes great political will to practise meritocracy. But it can be done,” he added.