that's the standard excuse for every tom, d***, harry upstart uni wanting to start a medical school......

the shortage figures will become surplus in 2014....ie people entering med schools now will feel the heat when they graduate....

remember there is a 5-6 year lag between starting med school and graduating......if the unis do projections based on current data, without taking into account of those new upstarts med schools (mahsa, masterskill, ucsi, cucms, monash, newcastle, taylors, segi, utar etc), they will get their sums wrong.........

and these new doctors have nowhere to go except msia.........their degrees will NOT be recognised elsewhere.......(yes, even monash mbbs is not recognised out of msia and oz)..........

never in the history of human civilisation, has so many new medical schools been set up within so short a time frame in so small a country........

all new medical students thinks their med schools are 'freaking good'........

the problem is, you have NO basis for comparison, as you have NOT experienced other med schools.......

it appears good to you because you have moved up to a different level of education.......yes, it is 'good' compared to your secondary schools.......how can it be not, as a university?........

cucms entry cut-offs are amongst the lowest....quite comparable to russia/indonesia....i know people with pretty mediocre results who got in........the uni have no choice, as people with better results will have been accepted into more established med schools........ask yourself, if you were accepted into aimst/imu/mmmc and money is no problem, would you choose cucms?.........

i have a simple rule of thumb.....the quality and calibre of a med school (or any uni for that matter) is measured by the quality of students accepted......

there are of course other considerations like the academic staffs, facilities, amount of research etc, but all these correlates closely with the quality of students applying and accepted......

why do you think harvard and oxbridge are where they are?........do you all have any idea the process they go through to SELECT their students from the tens of thousands applicants.......

so just look at the kinds of students accepted, compare to other med schools, and you will get an idea what that place is like.......

for prospective med students, try applying for med schools in the top 100 unis in the thes list (that includes nus, hku, melb, anu, sydney, monash(even the msian one), uq, unsw, uwa, in this region)........and see whether you can get in.....then you may know what a 'freaking good' med school is........

come to think of it, for non-malays, try get into the top 3 ipta med schools (um, ukm, usm)........they have stood the test of time, although their intake policy (and hence student quality) follows a dichotomous distribution.........

if you consider the THES top 100 unis as 'popular and fancy', there is nothing else for me to say..........

it would be something like what happened to um/ukm grads before official recognition by smc recently....for more than 20 years, um/ukm graduates have been taken into spore on a case by case basis.............

what you need to look for in the nails is all in any textbook on clinical examinations.......so which parts don't you understand........

if you are not bumi, what makes you think you can get selected for matrik?...........

even if you get into matrik, what makes you think you can get into um?..........

the us system makes it very short in the postgraduate training process......and very focused.....

on the other hand, it makes everybody 'specialised' and nobody a generalist, which can be bad for patient care, as there is no one with the broad expertise to manage a whole patient......each specialist takes care of that little bit of the patient within his area of expertise.....

it also means the basic 'specialist' ie internal medicine is actually the equivalent of a vocationally trained GP in the commonwealth system (uk/oz/nz), so isn't really a specialist.........in fact, the vocationally trained GP have wider and deeper expertise than the internist..........they do more than the american internist.........but they are not recognised as 'specialist', although there is a move to classify them as family medicine specialist.........

the american family medicine board certification is decreasing, less and less doctors choose this, as remuneration is smaller compared to surgical or some medical specialties.........and less prestigious.......

the result is, patients choose specialists over the family physicians, if they have a choice......they do not have the gate keeper role of the gp in the commonwealth socialised health care system..........

there is a board certification in both adult medicine (im) and paediatrics, and that may be taking over some of the functions of the family physicians.....

the other dying discipline is the general surgeon....

there is also a trend in commonwealth countries to shorten the training period, and make it more focused.....but by and large, trainees are still expected to be exposed to a wider range of disciplines in the earlier years before they focus down into an area.....

there is an awareness that there are merits in exposing doctors to a broad range of disciplines, before they be expected to subspecialised, and most commonwealth countries are doing that, but it can make the training process very long.....in the old uk system, one takes 10-15 years to reach consultant grade......