Deputy Health Minister’s gaff: License to Kill
posted in - Ethics, - Nation, - Palmdoc |
The Deputy Health Minister made a stunning remark in Parliament which was reported in the media (Malaysiakini, Star etc.)
Deputy Health Minister Dr Abdul Latiff Ahmad sparked an uproar in the Dewan Rakyat when he described medical doctors as having a “licence to kill”.
Replying to Alexander Nanta Linggi (BN-Kapit) on the shortage of doctors in remote areas of Sarawak, he explained that local universities are not producing sufficiently skilled doctors.
As a result, he said, the ministry is unable to approve their employment, adding: “As you all know, doctors have a licence to kill and a licence to cure.”
On hearing this, Dr Hatta Ramli (PAS-Kuala Krai) demanded a retraction of the statement as “it could send a negative signal to the public”.
As far as I am aware, there are no James Bonds in the medical community. The only ones given licenses to kill appear to be those who can handle explosives like C4 in “gazetted dumpsites”.
Indeed medical ethics forbids doctors from participating in lethal executions. Recently in the US, there’s been an uproar in the medical community when it was revealed that an anesthesiologist joined the Missouri execution team
No, Deputy Health Minister, the medical profession does not have a “license to kill”.
We abide by strict Medical Ethics and I repeat the relevant bits in the Geneva declaration:
I WILL NOT PERMIT considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient;
I WILL MAINTAIN the utmost respect for human life;
I think the Deputy Health Minister should apologise for his remark which has offended the medical profession.
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May 27th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Aha, methinks he ‘mis-spoke’ a la Biliary Clinton!
May 27th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Dr. Hsu has written a thought provoking piece on this issue.
May 27th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
for this remark to be said by the “DEPUTY HEALTH MINISTER” himself, and not knowing the fellow doctors under him are bound to Geneva declaration, who else is there to protect the doctor’s interest in the country?
Incompetent leaders. Let somebody with the qualification and brain to do the job and talking.
May 27th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Ya this has inspired me to blog about medical gadgets of death…
http://docfiles.blogspot.com/2008/05/licensed-to-kill-2-tongue-depressator.html
May 27th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Watch out for the depressator!
May 28th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Aik?? He said the same thing during his key note speech at the MMA Medical Students Conference in Penang. Didn’t thought it would go to the dewan rakyat.
May 28th, 2008 at 6:56 am
As Dr Hsu said, I don’t think the Deputy Health Minister meant doctors could be “killers” in the intentional sense, but what “he meant was that the standard of the medical graduates are now so low that they might have inadvertently, though not intentionally, caused deaths of patients who might otherwise be able to be saved by a more competently trained doctor.”
I quote further Dr Hsu:
Only recently I encountered an unfortunate young man who had been followed up and investigated in two large public hospitals in the Klang Valley for “cough” and being investigated for Tuberculosis and what not. After being frustrated for more than a year without a diagnosis and getting worse a quick work up shows gross pulmonary hypertension due to recurrent PE and the poor chap also has gross bilateral DVT. It’s not that he was not compliant – he went for follow-up and review even in the “klinik pakar”.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Who is to be blamed? The public hospital is the factory of ‘reprocessing’ the doctors. Almost ALL doctors in private sector gained thier valuable experience when they worked in the public hospitals. I still remembered a patient who scolded an arrogant private doctor that he should ‘thank’ the public hospital patients for their experience he gained when he had his training in the public hospitals.
‘There were of course instances where because of this delay, death might have been caused. These are not uncommon, just ask doctors in private practice.’ I can assured that the private doctors also have too many of such instances that I encountered.
The public hospitals has no choice they have to take ALL the doctors graduated from local and abroad. However, in the recent years, medical schools had been mushrooming so much so that it had became like the ‘Airasia’ style where “Anyone can become doctor’ as long as they have money. Medical school should be the training ground that they learned diagnosis, investigation and basic management of common medical problem. However it often resulted that many doctors especially those from the private medical schools are so inadequately trained and they are almost useless when they are in their housemanship period. Housemanship should not be the period that the consultants are trying to teach them all the medical basic knowledge again, it should be the period they gain their practical experience and skill.
So in my opinion, one of the main reason for the deterioration of doctor quality is the deterioration of the medical students quality itself. If we allow the budget style of producing the doctors where anyone who have money can study medicine then eventually these doctors will end up in the private sectors itself and start killing people. The worst of the worst who can’t go anywhere will remain in the public sector. The public sector do not have the option of firing them. The public hospital have to take in ALL these doctors as long as their medical schools are recognised regardless their quality of medical graduates.
May 28th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Just received a call from my doctor ，we got a referral from a well known private hospital in my area. A case of post pasrtum haemorrhage, sent to my PUBLIC hospital without even an IV line and doctor accompany. Just imagine! Got to go and do hysterectomy. This is the quality of private care you can get. Eventually we, the public hospital doctors who will deal with the mess they sent to us.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
A coin has two sides. I have bad experiences with patients referred from private sector, but also good ones. Take Paediatric cardiac cases, sometime IJN waiting list is simply too long and we had referred a few to a well- known private cardiac centre. They did the operations promptly and even raised funds for a few children that came from poor families.
I do agree medical schools nowsaday are producing doctors the “airasia” way. Be careful, they might be the doctors looking after you when you are old.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Yes I agree there are both sides of the coin. I also agree a major impetus to train your juniors does indeed come from the need for someone to look after us when we are old!
June 1st, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I was there when he first came up with this statement at the SMMAM’s (Student MMA) 14th Emergency Medicine conference, just a day before when he blurted out the same in the Dewan Rakyat. It sounds pretty offensive,
but actually I think DHM did not frame his language properly leading us all to think the otherwise offensive meaning of it. I think what he meant was Doctors who are incomptetent can actually make mistakes that can actually lead to death of the patients.
But I agree.. He should have thought over this before saying this out.
Had we students corrected him the day before, such an uproar and waste of time could have been avoided in the Dewan Rakyat the next day.
Not only did he fail to deliver his actual point about incompetent doctors but he made a mess in the rakyat due to the confusion.
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:09 am
My 2 sen opinion is that his comments are reckless.
His comments are typical of our Bolehland politicans. Wonder if he is a medical Dr, and if so when is the last time he actually practised medicine?