PETALING JAYA: Four senior specialists have stepped forward to defend the parallel pathway programme after a senior consultant paediatric surgeon argued against recognition of specialists under the programme through amendments to the Medical Act.
The four are Dr Musa Nordin from Damansara Specialist Hospital, Dr Zulkifli Ismail (Selangor Specialist Hospital), Dr Erwin J Khoo (International Medical University) and Dr Timothy Cheng (Duchess of Kent Sandakan Hospital).
They said Dr Dayang Anita Abdul Aziz’s remark on amending the Medical Act 1971 to resolve the non-recognition of parallel pathway training for specialists was “naïve and forgets the historical context” in this matter.
“Prior to 1973, the parallel pathway was virtually the only trainer and supplier of the nation’s specialist manpower. There are currently 13 such specialty training programmes in health ministry-run hospitals with another five in the pipeline.
“Don’t we actually owe the parallel pathway a debt of gratitude for the many competent specialists it has produced, even before the master’s degree programmes took off?” they said in a joint statement.
They were responding to a Code Blue report quoting Dayang as saying the parallel pathway was not equivalent to training programmes of Malaysian universities.
Dayang, who has a postgraduate certificate from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, said there were “genuine concerns” with the parallel pathway training programmes.
The four senior doctors sarcastically said they were “blown away by her bravado”, and maintained that health minister Dzulkefly Ahmad should proceed with proposing amendments to the Medical Act.
“As health minister, his stewardship role is to produce more specialists for both the public and private healthcare sectors. It can only happen if he ensures the feuding medical professionals work together to enhance the quantity of specialists trained and jealously guard the quality of our medical postgraduates.
“In the midst of the hostile exchanges between the medical professionals, he has elected to engage with the major stakeholders and endeavour to harmonise the parallel pathway with the masters programme,” they said.
Postgraduate medical curriculum
They said the national postgraduate medical curriculum was launched in 2021 by the Medical Deans Council to unify structured supervised training for both masters and parallel specialist training pathways.
However, they are still insufficient to meet the public healthcare sector’s need of 18,912 specialists by 2025, and 23,979 by 2030. “At the present production rate, only 19% of the total doctors in the public sector are specialists instead of the targeted 30%.”
Defending the quality of the parallel pathway programme, the doctors said the UK Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health formalised its work-based assessment in 2005 while Malaysia’s paediatric parallel pathway followed suit five years later.
“Virtually all the other parallel pathway programmes had consolidated their curriculum, training, postings, work-based assessments and exit criteria, among others, since 2014.
“To conflate the issues of two to three surgical-based pathway programmes poorly managed by the Malaysian Medical Council to the other up and running successful programmes is totally uncalled for,” they added. - FMT
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