Younger members of the College may be interested to learn about the RACP's involvement in postgraduate teaching in South-East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. The College contributed to medical education in Asia for over a decade, supported by funding from the Colombo Plan — a 1950s post-colonial initiative that provided economic and technical aid to Asian countries to promote development and counter communism in the region.

Around this time, College Membership was being recognised as of an equal standard to the Royal College of Physicians of London. Graduates of Asian schools were by then beginning to seek the Australasian Membership instead of the London one. Dr. Wong Hee Ong was the first doctor from Asia to take the RACP Membership exam, when she was successful at her first attempt in Melbourne in 1959. Censor-in-Chief at that time, Ken Noad, went to Singapore in 1961 to act as an external examiner in Medicine at the University of Singapore, where he would form relationships with the local academic medical fraternity and initiate interaction between the institutions.

In 1962, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Singapore, Dr. T. J. Danaraj, formally requested support by inviting a team of College physicians to conduct a postgraduate medicine course in collaboration with the Faculty. The College's Sub-committee to Investigate a Postgraduate Course in Singapore reported their recommendations to Council, and once the funding details were finalised, the courses began in 1963.

The College Newsletter of February 1963 announced that:

'After very careful investigation, Council has made two important decisions relating to the examination of candidates from Singapore and Malaya. For a trial period of three years candidates from those countries will be able to take the written examination in Singapore, and those who pass the written examination will be given the privilege of sitting for the clinical examination at the subsequent examination, in order that they may undertake postgraduate work in Australia or New Zealand in the intervening period.'

Dr. Francis Joseph Jayaratnam, Dr. Beatrice Chen Tsung Mong and Dr. Tham Ngaip Boo, pictured above, were admitted to Membership in Melbourne on 25th of May, 1964. They were the first candidates from South-East Asia to take and pass the Membership examination under the special conditions introduced by Council, noted above. They sat the written examination in Singapore in September 1963 and then undertook several months of postgraduate study at teaching hospitals in Australia before sitting the clinical examination in May 1964. Dr. Chen (who died earlier this year) had a particularly challenging road to Membership. One year before sitting the exam in Melbourne, her husband, Lim Hock Siew, was imprisoned as a political prisoner in Changi prison, where he would remain for twenty years.

Many of these Members would go on to leadership roles and teach the next generation of doctors in their homelands. The clinical exam would first be held in Singapore in 1971 and eventually, as a culmination of efforts, an Annual Scientific Meeting was held in Singapore in 1974. It was attended by the first President of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, who became an Honorary Fellow of the College at the Convocation Ceremony.

PRACP, John 'Jock' Frew, noted in his speech at the Ceremony:

We have been involved together now for more than ten years. The results are extremely valuable judged by any standards...And most important still is the good will, friendship and personal knowledge of each other's ways that mitigates the apparent attitudes of Governments.