If this move is to accommodate the graduate medical school partnership between Duke University in the United States and the National University of Singapore, then it is short-sighted.

The purpose of a graduate medical school is to get more mature doctors. This means doctors who are:

• Older. Older doctors are supposedly better able to understand patients' needs and problems. This is because they have seen more patients and conditions. That is why both doctors and lawyers' businesses are called practices - because the longer they work, the more they know and understand; and

   

   

• More experienced in life. This will supposedly give them an edge in the way they practise or research medicine.

   

  I therefore cannot understand how cutting housemanship and shortening training years will help new doctors or indeed Singapore in the long run.

  Cutting housemanship because the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School's students are too old panders to the weak. To be a doctor is a calling to a life of service and, in some disciplines of medicine, a constant barrage of emergencies and patients in need of help.

  Housemanship is an important time of training where a doctor is tried and tested - but under supervision. His attitude and responses in housemanship may later in his life make or break other patients' lives.

  Our system, which is based on the English system, has stood the test of time. Not everything American or Continental European is good. The Duke-NUS student may have a degree in social work or physics, but without a broad-based training in medicine, when he becomes a resident in surgery for example, he may be an ignoramus in diabetes or hypertension.

  And the old saying may really come true: 'The specialist is one who knows everything about nothing.'

  Dr Francis Seow Choen