Statement from an old‑school GP

I AM an old-school general practitioner (GP). I still remember walking muddy lanes for house calls and keeping watch beside a patient in their final hours.

My training was solid, my licence is valid, and my promise has always been simple: to be there when my patients need me, not when someone sitting on panels, website or badge decides I am allowed.

Today, I see a new trend sweeping in – “microcredentials”, digital badges and endless short courses that outside parties want to make compulsory for basic GP work.

To someone like me, this feels less like progress and more like micromanaging the very doctors who have quietly held communities together for decades.

When I did house calls, families did not ask how many certificates I had. They asked, “Doctor, will you come?” They trusted that if the government licensed me, I was fit to practice.

Now, I worry that insurers, managed care companies and commercial training providers are trying to slip in their own private rules: “No badge, no panel; no course, no payment.”

This is not about safety. This is about control – more precisely cost control.

Every extra “must‑have” course costs money and time. For a small clinic or an elderly GP like me, that may mean closing early, turning away patients or giving up work entirely.

Micromanaging us with more and more micro requirements will only drive up costs and push the old‑fashioned, community‑based GP to extinction. And I worry about whether I will have a GP to look after me when I retire.

I am not against learning. I still attend updates and read journals by habit.

But the heart of general practice is relationship, judgment and continuity, not an alphabet soup of badges on the clinic wall.

We should not allow outside parties to confuse patients or to quietly take over the role of our proper regulators by dangling microcredentials as new gatekeepers.

I hope the authorities will remember the value of the GP who has walked with families from cradle to grave.

Let us keep our standards under the care of the Malaysian Medical Council and the Health Ministry, not in the hands of middlemen and marketing departments.

AN OLD-SCHOOL GP

Petaling Jaya