Politicians can be responsive

I've been wanting to blog about this since the beginning of the week but couldn't find time until now. A few weeks back, I blogged about how Tok Pa should use incentives and not appeals to nationalism to entice Malaysian doctors abroad to come back home. There was a wide consensus in the responses towards what Tok Pa said and I also blogged about it here. The latest appeal was carried out by Health Minister, Dr. Chua Soi Lek. It looks like he's at least heard what some of the 'rakyat' had and have been saying.

The Star reported earlier this week that Dr. Chua, in a meeting with Malaysian students in London said that 'Malaysian specialist doctors will be rewarded with an “instant” pay rise of about RM4,000 if they were to return home and serve the country.' Their salary scale 'would immediately move up from the Grade U41 salary scale of RM3,000 to Grade U48 of RM7,000.' He also said 'the Public Services Department (PSD) had approved the “big jump” in recognition of their specialised skills and training in Britain.'

He didn't appeal to their sense of nationalism or patriotism. Indeed, the report explicitly stated that this was not the intention of the Health Minister. Rather, he appealed to them using a mixture of incentives, a higher salary scale being one of them.

But of course, we have to put this salary 'jump' into context. Does this mean that specialists who were trained overseas and who returned back to Malaysia only earned RM3,000 a month before Dr. Chua's announcement? This seems surprising, somehow. RM3,000 is what a fresh graduate working in Accenture in KL would get, not what a medical specialist should earn in a hospital, even if it is a government hospital. But if this is somehow true (because overseas trained specialists have to do 'time' within the local system first?), then it is no wonder that these specialists didn't want to come back to work in Malaysia in the first place.

The other question we have to ask is whether the RM4,000 'jump' is enough to entice a sufficient number of specialists to return home. We cannot compare how much a specialist in the UK is earning in ringgit terms because that is not an accurate indicator. For example, a specialist in London might be earning, let's say, 150,000 pounds a year which translates into 900,000RM a year (using a 6 to 1 exchange rate) or roughly 75,000RM a month, which is 10 times the 7,000RM he or she will be earning in Malaysia. But this does not take into account a high cost of living in London and a higher marginal tax rate that kicks in earlier than in Malaysia. Minus living expenses and taxes, the nett pay of this specialist in London might only be something like 40,000 pounds or 240,000RM per year or 20,000RM per month. It's still more than 7,000RM (or 5,000RM nett pay in Malaysia) but at least the gap is not as wide as perceived earlier.

I don't know if this salary is sufficient but addressing the issue of salary is a good start.

Dr. Cha also said that Malaysian medial students would 'find it more difficult to work in Britain in the next three to five years' as 'the British government would increasingly give preference to its citizens and EU nationals, while Malaysians would be lumped together with other nationalities'.

I actually doubt whether this is the case on the ground. While not having the proper citizenship, I have the impression that Malaysian doctors are well-respected and valued in the UK. They would have a better command of English than doctors from perhaps, the former community countries (Poland, Czech Republic for example) and they would have been the 'cream of the crop' to be able to go to the UK to study medicine in the first place and later, to take the specialist exams.

Furthermore, most Malaysian specialists in the UK would have been in the country long enough (10 years) to apply for a Permanent Resident status which would put them on more or less equal terms with citizens of other EU countries and even UK citizens. The enticement to come back to Malaysia only works for those who have finished their medical degree (which takes about 5 to 6 years) and have not done their specialisation).

But if they do want to come back to Malaysia, then they would have to ask - is it better for me to do my specialist courses in Malaysia or in the UK? Earlier, I blogged about the dean of the UKM medicine faculty, Prof. Dr. Lokman Sain, appealing for Malaysian doctors to return home to do their specialist degree in Malaysia because there were more places open to them in Malaysia. Dr. Chua seems to have used similar arguments, which received some criticisms in that earlier post.

Interestingly, in the Star on the same day, this report came out, saying that it took 8 years to do a specialist course in Malaysia while it would only take 2/3rds of that time (I'm guessing 5 to 6 years) in the UK.

Again, one can criticize Dr. Chua's approach in this respect but at least, he's appealing to their self-interest rather than asking them to come back based on nationalistic or patriotic appeals. And even if the argument about non-EU citizens is not entirely accurate, at least he's putting the perception out there that things are not always rosy overseas compared to the situation back in Malaysia.

Finally, some of the points which the Star report briefly highlighted are also encouraging. They included:

- ON-CALL allowance in- creased from RM25 to RM170
- ALLOWING locum in government hospitals
- SIMPLIFIED Bahasa Malaysia exam for service confirmation
- FULL-PAYING patients in Putrajaya and Selayang hospitals as a pilot project, where part of the full rates go to doctors
- 298 promotional posts approved for senior positions

I think that these are moves which were enacted to prevent government doctors from moving to the private sector in the Malaysian context. But they also bode well for doctors who are thinking of moving back home to Malaysia.

This episode clearly shows that our politicians (at least some of them) can be responsive towards what the public is saying or has been saying on certain issues. Hopefully, this trend can continue.