KUALA LUMPUR, May 8 — The United Kingdom government said it would continue promoting British education in Malaysia, despite restricting medical training priority to UK graduates under a new law.
The UK’s Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act 2026 prioritises UK medical graduates for foundation training places, while prioritising UK medical graduates and other doctors with “significant NHS experience” for specialty training positions in the National Health Service.
“The UK will continue to promote UK education in Malaysia.
“Education has been and will remain an important pillar of the longstanding relationship between the UK and Malaysia,” the British High Commission in Malaysia told CodeBlue in a brief statement today.
More than 100 graduates of Newcastle University’s Malaysian branch in Johor, Newcastle University Medicine Malaysia (NUMed), were deprioritised for medical foundation training in the UK this year, like other international medical graduates who trained outside the UK.
NUMed confirmed that all 103 of its graduates who applied for the 2026 UK Foundation Programme cycle were placed on the “reserve” list, despite holding a UK qualification accredited by the General Medical Council (GMC) and meeting all academic and regulatory standards.
Newcastle University maintained that the MBBS degree awarded by NUMed remained a “high-quality UK medical degree”, and that previous NUMed graduates could pursue successful medical careers across the UK and globally.
NUMed – which reportedly has nearly 850 medical students – didn’t provide a breakdown of the number of Malaysian and non-Malaysian graduates.
Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad told reporters yesterday that the government was prepared to absorb all 850 of NUMed’s students for housemanship training in Malaysia.
His office, however, later clarified with CodeBlue that international NUMed graduates won’t be able to do their housemanship here, unless they are a spouse of a Malaysian citizen or have permanent residence in Malaysia, due to citizenship restrictions for provisional registration from the Malaysian Medical Council (MMC) under the Medical Act 1971.
According to an explainer by the British Medical Association, medical students who complete the majority or all of their degree abroad at a UK medical school’s international campus will not be prioritised under the UK’s new legislation.
In an impact assessment, the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care raised “significant ethical concerns” in attracting doctors from poorer countries with very low numbers of doctors per population compared to the UK.
“It is therefore beneficial to other countries as well as the UK that we rely less on international recruitment.”
Malaysia has a shortage of housemen, with only 529 medical graduates reporting for duty out of 5,000 housemanship slots offered in the January 2026 intake.
