Foreign Doctors? No, Singapore Projected To Have More Medical Students And Local Doctors

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There has been much commotion over MOH Holdings’ (MOHH) recruitment call for overseas doctors. In particular, it plans to hire 180 doctors from India over the next 3 years. Before we start worrying about our rice bowls or the local-foreigner ratio, here are some points to give everyone a clearer picture.

Singapore increasing annual intake of medical students

First things first, Singapore has been steadily increasing the annual intake in local medical schools. Currently, students can take up medicine in NUS, NTU and Duke-NUS. More than 10 years ago, the intake was only 300. This has almost doubled to 500 in recent years.

The aim of increasing the number of local medical students is for us to grow a strong local core in the healthcare sector. But achieving that will take a while as we have to wait for students to graduate and enter the workforce. It is projected that the impact of the increased medical school intake will be seen in 2023.

This is why from now till next year, Singapore will have to recruit a small percentage of professional, overseas-trained doctors to fill in the gaps.

Hiring from a strictly-controlled list of universities

MOHH does not hire from any overseas university. The Singapore Medical Council (SMC) maintains a strictly-controlled list of universities that is regularly reviewed and revised. Schools that make it to the list have been vetted, with their international rankings and performances accounted for.

In 2019, the Council struck off almost 50 overseas universities that have registrable basic medical qualifications. At present, MOHH can only recruit doctors from 23 countries/regions. The reason for a strict criteria is to ensure that the quality of doctors are high. The breakdown of countries is shown below.

Referenced from MOH

Many of these universities are internationally well-ranked and recognized. Even one of the universities from India, the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, is globally ranked well in the area of medicine at no. 151, on par with George Washington University, Hokkaido University and University of Ottawa. Both India universities are among the Top 3 in medicine in their country.

Meanwhile, NUS and NTU are ranked no. 24 and 89 for medicine respectively.

More than 90% of doctors are locals

At a glance, 180 doctors may look daunting. This number is for a total of 3 years, which means MOHH plans to recruit an average of 60 doctors from India a year. To put things into perspective, there are around 14,279 doctors in public healthcare alone in Singapore. The percentage of doctors from India compared to locals would therefore be 0.42%.

Besides, MOHH will be recruiting more doctors from the US, UK and Europe. Nonetheless, they guaranteed that more than 90% of doctors under MOHH are locals.

Taken as a whole, recruiting a small percentage of overseas doctors from a carefully selected criteria means Singapore is only taking in people of high standards. Most of our doctors will still be locals. This is key as it concerns the lives of Singaporeans and the quality of services they get. Ideally, the new hires can help to ease the workload of local doctors as many of them are overworked. It will also essentially prepare us for a few years down the road, when more medical students eventually graduate and contribute to our stronger Singaporean workforce.

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