A big-hearted educator
PROF Simon Frostick is not a name most Malaysians outside the medical fraternity would know. I met Prof Frostick in January 2014 when we wanted to embark on a major review of the specialist training programme at Universiti Malaya (UM).
Simon, who was then a visiting professor at the orthopaedics unit at UM’s Faculty of Medicine, offered to help. He, along with his colleague David Pitts, had developed Britain’s first trauma and orthopaedic curriculum and so knew a thing or two about curriculum review and development. Their motivation? David, who is married to a Malaysian, has, as he says, many Malaysian relatives who he hopes that, if one day they ever needed medical attention, would receive the best of care from competent, well-trained doctors and specialists. Simon’s? Nothing, beyond a genuine passion and commitment to contributing towards enhancing the quantity and quality of specialists and enhancing Malaysian healthcare in general.
What started as a UM project soon expanded to involve all of the public medical schools and the Health Ministry, and the current specialist training programme is a collaborative effort to train and assess junior doctors vying to become specialists in what is colloquially known as the Conjoint Programme.
And so for the last five years, teams of specialists from various speciality groups painstakingly undertook to revise and improve the training curriculum under the guidance of Simon and David during whatever spare time these busy clinicians could carve out in between caring for patients, teaching and training undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as conducting research. As Simon often remarked, it would be quicker for him and David to rewrite the curriculum for us, but aside from strengthening and improving the standard of care, he also believed in building local capacity to undertake curriculum and standards review and writing.
And so it was, over those years, the two of them would come to Kuala Lumpur every three months or so from Britain and spend a week at a time to help us rework all of the specialist training curriculum into modern competency-based programmes. When back in Britain, they would spend hours poring over documents that colleagues from the various specialties here would submit for them to edit and comment on.
Who else but Simon would agonise over how best to design a professional values and ethics module so that at the end of it all we will have specialists who are not only well-trained in the specifics of their respective specialities, but also have the necessary attitude and behaviour befitting the profession? And that was not the only thing that he carefully considered. Many discussions took place on how to balance the research module so that we have clinicians who are able to understand research and critically appraise medical literature in the setting of a very demanding training programme and future practice. Despite not having practised in Malaysia, Simon understood the needs of a busy tertiary practice as well as that of rural Malaysia and helped redesign the existing curricula to cater for both.
In February 2019, two days after returning to Liverpool, Britain, following one his visits to KL, Simon called with the bad news that he had cancer of the kidney. He reassured me that despite that, I had his total commitment to see the project through. And continue he did. Despite undergoing chemotherapy, Simon persevered and made the long trips to KL as promised. On one of those trips last year, gaunt and pale from both the disease and treatment, he stoically soldiered on, for “we have work to do”. When back in Liverpool he would edit and comment on volumes of work that my colleagues would submit.
Unfortunately, the cancer got the better of him despite chemo and immunotherapy. No longer able to make the long trip, Simon continued to work with David and us through long telephone conversations and emails to see the project through because he so believed what he was doing was for the good of future Malaysian specialists and, most importantly, for the people of Malaysia.
On Saturday the Malaysian medical fraternity lost a very good friend and mentor. Many who did not know him well only saw the tough, and some would say brusque, side of him. Some even found him arrogant and abrupt. But underneath this seemingly most British of British men was a profoundly sincere, generous and committed humanitarian who cared deeply about improving the standards of the medical profession in Malaysia through this specialist training programme.
His commitment to and passion for the project for which he expected no payment or anything in return was unmatched by any person that I have worked with.
Simon never got to see the launch of all the years of hard work that he and everyone else had put in towards the National Postgraduate Medical Curriculum, but his important legacy will live on in the future specialists that we will train to the highest standards that he believed we should strive for.
Rest in peace Prof Simon P. Frostick, clinician, educator, researcher with a big and selfless heart, and the perfect embodiment of an academic-clinician. May the Almighty bless him and his family for all that he has done.