Medical Depression 2.0

Warning: For junior doctors or medical students in Malaysia (or planning to flood the Malaysia healthcare system), by continuing to read further, it may cause clinical depression. (Either that, or it's still not too late to go into the 'kacang puteh' business, which earns as much with good quality of life)

Few days ago, Palmdoc wrote the following:

A little bird has told us that MITI wishes to accelerate the liberalization of Health services in Malaysia. Originally, the date for full liberalization was 2015 but now they want to bring it forward to 2012.

Opening up our borders in the field of healthcare has its pros and cons.
Whatever they are, in the era of globalization, it is inevitable.

The question is, will 2012 be too early?

Is everyone (from the MMC, National Specialists Register, Professional bodies) prepared?

Heck we don’t even have the necessary legislation in place yet as far as compulsory CME and compulsory enforcement of the NSR goes.

While big businesses may be smacking their lips at the opportunity to make money in Malaysia, everyone should be genuinely concerned about whether or not
- medical standards can be maintained
- liberalization affects healthcare in the areas which are needed e.g. rural vs urban

If you chose to skip reading above because of all the seriousness in between, inside and outside of those words in the previous paragraph, I seriously suggest it should re-read again.

It is a very depressing piece of news or rumor. That is the reason why I chose today's date to release it. Hopefully, it will remain a rumor but then again, hope is never the strongest word in English. 'Hope' can bring a candidate to presidency but never to allow the presidency to sit in comfort.

Maintenance of medical standards at our current system has been made more difficult partially because of the avalanche of new medical grads (which I aptly appointed this as medical depression 1.0), partially because the ignorance of certain powerful quarters to acknowledge and rectify it and partially due to the fact that most of us rather sit here and blog about it because if we don't.

With all due respect, I belong to the 3rd group. My Chinese horoscope, at some point, defined me.

If you have ample time for reading more about globalization of Malaysian healthcare and can stand reading through 80 slides of presentation without too much of fatigue, heavy-headed or other symptoms of information-overload, I reckon you should run through the following presentation by Dr. DQ. downloadable here, as well.

Medical Globalization by Dr David Quek

View more presentations from pilocarpine.

Liberalization of health service will bring more bane than boon with our current standards of 'check and balance'. The current and future junior doctors will find themselves drowning in the tsunami of doctors from outstation with medical liberalization while competing among the massive number of the peers.

And the big question will be...

with the end of the world, at least we won't be having Medical Depression 3.0