SHAH ALAM, 18 Nov: The Central Government should take immediate action on the alleged claim by the Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) that the health sector will fail to provide employment opportunities for medical graduates next year.

The lack of job opportunities, according to the MMA, is due to the government’s failure in building adequate hospitals to meet the needs of the people, and also, there are too many private medical colleges, thus producing too many medical graduates.

The Assemblyman for Meru, Dr Abdul Rani bin Osman, said that this situation contributes to the imbalance between the number of job opportunities and the number of medical graduates produces.

“If the MMA itself issued this statement, then it is a serious and scary matter. I hope that the Ministry of Health will respond quickly on this matter and we have to examine this because there are many more graduates out there.

“We cannot assume that our graduates overseas will work in countries such as Arab and the United Kingdom because usually, even though they are working there, they will return to work here,” Dr Rani told Selangor Kini.

Abdul Rani said that even though building hospitals is the responsibility of the Federal Government, the State Government had earlier agreed to build additional buildings at the Tengku Ampuan Rahimah Hospital to accommodate the number of patients in Klang.

Previously, the President of MMA, Datuk N.K.S Tharmaseelan, in a reported statement, said that this country produces up to 5,000 medical graduates every year, causing there to be a lack of hospitals for further training and employment opportunities for this group.

Among the factors contributing to this situation, according to him, is the number of private medical colleges, which has reached up to 40 institutions, for the population of 28 million, a high number at this time seeing that there are fewer developments of new hospitals.