18th Apr 2019
To meet the changing healthcare needs of Singaporeans, and to ensure that the quality of overseas-trained doctors practising in Singapore remains high, the list of registrable basic medical qualifications under the Medical Registration Act is reviewed from time to time. The Singapore Medical Council (SMC) has reviewed the list, and proposed that the number of overseas medical schools with registrable basic medical qualifications be reduced from 160 to 103, effective on 1 January 2020. The Ministry of Health (MOH) has accepted SMC’s recommendation.
2. The revised list of overseas medical schools with registrable basic medical qualifications can be found in the Annex. Please refer to SMC’s website at www.smc.gov.sg for the revised List of Registrable Basic Medical Qualifications from these overseas medical schools.
3. Singapore Citizen and Singapore Permanent Resident students who have already secured a place as a candidate in a medical programme from a school that is no longer on the list, or who are studying in the affected schools before 1 January 2020, will not be affected by the change. They will be considered for medical registration with SMC if they fulfil the prevailing requirements, subject to an offer of employment with an SMC-approved healthcare institution upon their graduation.
4. In line with MOH’s Healthcare Manpower Plan to provide quality healthcare services for Singaporeans, we have been growing our local healthcare training pipelines and building a strong local core to meet the healthcare needs of our ageing population. Total annual intakes into our local medical schools have risen from about 300 in 2010 to about 500 in 2018 from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore, Duke-NUS Medical School and the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at the Nanyang Technological University.1 The impact of the increase in local medical school intake will be fully realised from 2023, when these students graduate. As such, we expect our need to recruit overseas-trained doctors to moderate and stabilise in the coming years.
5. The review of the list of registrable basic medical qualifications also took into consideration various factors including international and national rankings of these universities, as well as performance of conditionally registered doctors from these universities, to ensure that the quality of overseas-trained doctors practising in Singapore locally remains high.
6. SMC will continue to review the list regularly based on the evolving needs of Singapore’s healthcare system while upholding high standards of medical practice.
1 The Duke-NUS Medical School was set up in 2005, while the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine was set up in 2013.
MINISTRY OF HEALTH and SINGAPORE MEDICAL COUNCIL