Reduced number of approved overseas medical schools

FROM next year, Singaporeans and permanent residents going overseas to study medicine with the aim of practising as doctors in Singapore will have a shorter list of 103 schools to choose from, down from the current 160.

The Singapore Medical Council (SMC) and the Ministry of Health (MOH) announced on April 18 that a revised list sees the number of approved overseas medical schools cut. The change takes effect from Jan 1 next year.

Students who have already secured a place or who are currently studying at one of the other 57 schools will not be affected.

They will be considered for medical registration with the SMC – which is required to practise medicine in Singapore – if they fulfil the prevailing requirements and have an offer of employment with a council-approved healthcare institution upon their graduation, the SMC and the MOH said in a joint statement.

The revision was done to ensure that the quality of foreign-trained doctors practising in Singapore remains high and because local universities are expanding places for medicine.

The SMC and the MOH said that the total annual intake across the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, the Duke-NUS Medical School and the Nanyang Technological University’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine has risen from 300 in 2010 to 500 in 2018.

“As such, we expect our need to recruit overseas-trained doctors to moderate and stabilise in the coming years,” the statement said.

The revised list does not include any new additions. According to the MOH and the SMC, the list of schools was last reviewed in October 2009.

The review took into account the national and international rankings of the universities on the list, as well as the performance of conditionally registered doctors who studied there.

Eight schools in the United States, seven in Canada, and six each in Britain and India are among the 57 dropped from the list of approved overseas medical schools.

Also dropped are all medical schools in Israel, Italy, Norway, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which each had one or two on the list previously.

The University of Wales College of Medicine, a British school dropped from the list, no longer exists after merging in 2004 with Cardiff University, which will remain on the list.

Two British schools, which are no longer on the list of approved medical schools, had previously reported low intakes of students from Singapore.

The Queen’s University of Belfast said in 2017 that on average, one student from Singapore graduates from its undergraduate medicine programme each year, while the University of St Andrews in Scotland said it had about three a year.

Both universities said the figures remained stable over the previous decade.

The SMC said that in recent years, it has registered about 120 doctors who were trained at the affected schools each year, about 30 of whom are Singaporeans and permanent residents.

By contrast, Imperial College London said that from 2010 to 2017, it saw between 11 and 24 graduates from Singapore a year. It will continue to be an approved medical school. — The Straits Times/Asia News Network