See, this here, pisses me off.
Every year, due to the ill-conceived and unjustly small number of
places available in local Medical schools, many hundreds of
Singapore students (who perform better academically and thus are
better qualified than many foreigners who get to study Medicine in
their own countries with much larger Med school intakes), many with
straight As, are forced to spend a million dollars (with some
parents going into serious debt or selling their homes to support
their son/daughter's aspirations) to study Medicine overseas.
And most of these Singaporeans do succeed in completing their
medical degrees from Universities and medical schools recognized by
Singapore Medical Council (SMC). Some of these overseas Med schools
and Universities are even more reputable and internationally
recognized than local Med schools.
So this proves it's not truly a matter of prudently restricting
local Med school student intake for the sake of quality control,
but more actually a matter of ill-conceived and maladjusted
education policies resulting in overly small local Med school
intakes, resulting in a critical shortage of medical doctors in
Singapore, in turn resulting in thousands of foreigners (some with
dubious academic performance, medical training and professional
qualifications) being imported in to meet Singapore's needs.
How would you feel if you were one of many such hundreds of
Singaporeans every year, perform better (eg. straight As) than many
of the foreigners imported in to meet the shortage, and thus feel
you're more deserving but are nonetheless turned away from local
Med schools, only because of the overly small intake of students
for local Med schools.
Which leaves you with 2 choices : either struggle to borrow a
million dollars to receive a Medical school education overseas
recognized by SMC, or give up on your lifelong aspirations to serve
society as a doctor. While every year, you see/hear the local media
announce, "Shortage of medical doctors in Singapore, foreign
doctors imported in to meet Singapore's needs".
S'pore sees a rise in foreign doctors
More than a quarter of the doctors in the public healthcare sector
are foreigners.
At the end of last year, public hospitals and polyclinics had more
than 2,100 foreign doctors in their employ and the number continues
to grow as Singapore faces a shortage of trained medical
staff.
Full article :
http://mypaper.sg/top-stories/spore-sees-rise-foreign-doctors-20151123