Letter to The Editor: Introducing Physician Assistants to Thailand’s Rural Health

Abstract

We read with interest the paper by Thira and Patarawan Woratanarat, titled “Assessment of Prospective Physician Characteristics by SWOT Analysis”, published in the Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences, Volume 19, Issue 1, January 2012 (1). It reports outcomes of a SWOT analysis conducted among 568 medical students at Chulalongkorn University with the objective of becoming “a good physician in the future”. In the last cohort measured (i.e., 2010), it turned out to be that 12.56% of the surveyed students did not want to be a doctor at all. The authors further indicate that despite the growth towards 18 medical schools in Thailand, still, the demand for medical doctors cannot be supplied. Can these results be extrapolated to the Thai medical student population in general? If so, which more measures, besides increasing the number of medical schools, would finally halt the
medical workforce shortage? As shown, not only will there be an absolute shortage of physicians (i.e., due to a lower influx of junior doctors and retirement of seniors), but also in the relative count (i.e., due to feminisation of the profession and maldistribution of the medical workforce throughout Thailand). Even though not statistical significant (P = 0.553), a positive trend had been demonstrated from 2008 to 2010 (25.00%, 25.95%, and 29.65%, respectively) that 5th year medical students were increasingly not willing to work in rural area or community after graduation (1). Herewith, Thailand has a looming (rural) health care crisis at hand