Another call for a unified MQE

Malaysia now has a situation where there is a glut of house officers, to the extent that HOs are now put on shift rotation rather than put “on call”. Part of this seems to stem from a Government policy to ‘flood the market’ with doctors, despite warnings from senior doctors about declining standards. This applies to the mushrooming of local medical colleges (some with dubious staffing) as well as graduates from medical schools of dubious standards.
It’s not surprising that the issue of a unified Medical Qualifying Examination arises yet again. In theory this would be a fair system but in practice this would be very difficult to implement. Firstly, if it were to be fair (truly meritocratic) then it should apply without favour to all local and foreign medical graduates. Secondly it will be a huge logistic exercise, one that perhaps can be achieved if all the local medical schools agree to do away with their final exams to be replaced by a common MQE.
Read this 2 part letter on a common MQE published in the Sun Daily:

Standardise evaluation of medical graduates

One qualifying exam for all

The author of the letter concluded by saying it is to ‘help graduates of foreign medical colleges’. I don’t agree this should be the primary aim. The primary aim is to safe guard medical standards, irrespective of where one graduated from. We’ve covered the topic of MQEs quite a bit in the past and here are our previous related posts

So what do you think? Should there be a common MQE? Do you think it can be done?