The Local Medical Graduates & The SAITM
By Hansika Hanthanapitiya –January 18, 2016
Hansika Hanthanapitiya
We have a solution; only if you’re ready to listen; An Open Letter to the Government of Sri Lanka, the Local Medical Graduates and the SAITM
I will get to the solution strait away.
What if the government established a system where every medical graduate, local, local-private and foreign, has to go through THE SAME standard written and viva examinations so that;
- Graduates from Colombo Medical Faculty can finally stop saying/thinking that they’re better than all the other local graduates from the rest of the government universities in the country put together,
- All local graduates can finally stop pointing fingers at SAITM saying their educational standards are inferior to that of the local graduates’,
- And all foreign graduates who want to practice medicine in Sri Lanka, who are from elite universities like Harvard or Cambridge or any other university which has better international recognition than the Colombo Medical Faculty can finally stop turning their noses up at the local graduates cause their medical education experience is far superior to theirs,
Because everyone will be facing THE SAME set of exams which will standardize the quality of medical graduates who will go on to become doctors in our country and they will all have the same level of knowledge and skills. This I believe will be the most effective solution to the problem, considering the current situation.
Now holding one final standard exam to issue the government medical license to medical graduates (much like the medical examination systems in America and most developed countries), along with one-one-one interviews to assess the mental stability and community mindedness of the examinees, will ensure that none of the doctors would get discriminated at the workplace for being not from the medical faculty of Colombo, or a local university- because this happens quite often, directly or indirectly, and I believe that this negativity affects the performance of the doctors in a hospital setting. Most graduates from Colombo Medical Faculty always regard themselves to be superior to others and consequently even the doctors who are better than Colombo Med graduates but are from other local universities feel inferior to them. I’m sure that everybody agrees that this has to stop.
