Medical education in Malaysia: quality versus quantity

Medical education in Malaysia has a long history dating back to the establishment of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Malaya in 1963 [1]. Currently, there are 32 medical schools in the country (11 public and 21 private). At the end of 2014, there were 18,789 students in all years in Malaysian medical schools and another estimated 15,000 Malaysians studying medicine abroad [2]. This implies that 30,000 doctors will join the Malaysian healthcare system within the next five years and by 2018 the number of doctors will double [2]. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) recommendation of 1 doctor to 400 persons for a developed nation has frequently been used to justify this mass production of doctors. While having too many doctors can be problematic, having too many poor-quality doctors can certainly worsen the problem. Since 2009, 20% of the medical students who enter foreign universities to study medicine lack the minimum entry qualifications [3] and news on the poor quality of medical graduates is not uncommon in the mainstream media of Malaysia. Another issue concerning the proliferation of medical schools, particularly in the past decade, is the quality of the schools themselves. In recent years there have been reports of smaller or less stable private medical schools facing financial problems, with some of them closing down or having their international partners withdraw their collaboration. To combat the issue of quantity, the government announced a five-year moratorium (from 2011 to 2016) on medical programmes in 2010 [4], whereas in 2014, the num-