AS a foreign medical graduate who worked overseas for seven years and now in Malaysia for the past 27, I was surprised and bemused by the furore over the introduction of contracts for house officers (HOs) by the Health Ministry in December 2016. Since then, many of this first batch of 1,219 contract HOs have completed their two-year tenure, resulting in a surge in “floating contract medical officers” (MOs) in the hospitals where they were placed. Effectively, a solution introduced to deal with too many medical graduates has merely postponed the problem by two years.

I am currently helping my daughter to apply for a medical job in another country, and I would like to give my opinion on contract medical jobs. Under the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, all medical posts are contract jobs. While housemanship is almost guaranteed by the parent medical school, post-housemanship doctors will have to apply for jobs. A cycle then ensues involving the preparation of curriculum vitae (CV) and cover letters, interviews, rejections and finally a job offer.