PETALING JAYA: The health ministry will ask the Cabinet to expedite the proposed amendment to the Medical Act 1971 (Act 50) and ensure that medical specialists who have completed their training under the parallel pathway programme (PPP) will be registered, says health minister Dzulkefly Ahmad.
Dzulkefly said the ministry hopes to have the amendment done by the second sitting of the third session of Parliament in June.
“Concurrently, efforts to bolster specialist training through homegrown master’s programmes will be intensified to augment local capacity-building.
“The health ministry is committed to enhancing the number of medical specialists to fulfil the healthcare needs of our nation,” he said in a statement.
Dzulkefly said that separate discussions between him and Orla Tunney, the Irish ambassador to Malaysia, as well as David Wallace, the UK’s deputy high commissioner to Malaysia, had seen all parties agreeing to fortify ongoing partnerships with his ministry.
This announcement follows the furore in recent days over the Malaysian Medical Council’s (MMC) refusal to recognise specialists graduating under the health ministry’s parallel pathway programme.
Under the PPP, doctors are trained in high-volume accredited health ministry facilities and hospitals under the guidance of royal colleges in the UK.
Senior doctors have claimed that MMC rejected the applications of some eight cardiothoracic surgeons and 100 family medicine specialists trained under the PPP for listing on the National Specialist Register (NSR), despite repeated requests from the health ministry to do so.
The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (RCSEd) has also criticised MMC’s non-recognition of its cardiothoracic surgery parallel pathway programme, with RCSEd president Rowan W Parks saying that it had put excellent surgeons in an untenable and unfair position. - FMT
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