It’s not just about money, Dr Chua

I've been told by my friends that my blog is too wordy. They suggested that I should add more pics. I do agree that a picture speaks a thousand words but sometimes there aren't any pictures to convey what I would like to speak. Here is one of them. Sorry guys. I just had to say my piece. Feel free to skip it but if u have the time, I appreciate a read or two. :-P

Our Health Minister recently announced that specialists willing to return from overseas will be placed on the salary scale of Grade U48, “RM4,000 jump for docs” (The Star, May 22).

Not too long ago (before the Sarawak Election clouded out everything else, including the devastation of the coral reef in Sipadan), doctors working overseas were called all kinds of names for not returning to serve in their own country. They were labeled ungrateful, unpatriotic and mercenaries among other things.

Now it seems the Health Ministry is dangling out a different kind of carrot. “Come back now and we will instantly promote you to Grade U48 (starting scale for Specialists in the civil service); no need to start from scratch anymore.” The starting salary will be RM 7,000 instead of the RM 3,000 odd if they started from scratch (meaning a Medical Officer’s pay).

In addition to this, the minister also warned that in the next few years, it will become more and more difficult for Malaysian doctors to work in Britain as it has to give preference to citizens in the EU. Malaysian doctors would be lumped with others from all over the world.

While the announcement was much welcomed, I wonder how many will actually go for the carrot. I also wonder why it took so long for the Ministry to finally agree to give recognition to these returning specialists when it has been a perpetual grouse for as long as I can remember.

How many will want to come back if by coming back you have to start at MO level, with all your foreign (and well recognized all over the world) qualifications and years of experience ignored? Who will give up a well-paying job overseas to return home to a measly RM 3,000 per month? Being patriotic has nothing to do with it.

I am glad that the Health Ministry is finally doing some thing in the right direction. Still, at the end of the day, I really doubt many will take up the offer. The crux of the matter is, it’s not just about the money.

This July marks the 10th year of my service as a doctor. Though there has been great joy serving in this noble occupation, I have more than my fair share of hardships too. Some of them are listed below:

1. As a House Officer (HO) in the Kuala Lumpur General Hospital (KLGH), I was made to work 7 days a week. If I wanted off on a Sunday, I had to apply for leave. Sundays were considered half day work in the medical department there. Half day here meant you finish your work at 3 or 4 pm!
2. The maximum number of calls I have done in a month as a HO was 18 days! That meant there were days I had to work back to back with no break in between.
3. To add salt to the wound, I was not allowed to claim call allowances more than 8 days per month as I was told by the hospital that they ‘did not have the budget’.
4. My working hours in the medical department was from 5.30 am till 9 pm if I was not on call. And if I were, I had to work from 5.30 am till 9 pm the next day!
5. I have slept on any number of the following: transfer trolley, sofas, patient’s bed, floor, chair and coffee table, simply because hospitals were built with no thought of a resting place for doctors (they still built hospitals this way)
6. I have been denied taking leave even when I got married, because there are ‘not enough doctors around’.
7. My starting pay was RM1690 and the call claim then was RM 20 per 24 hours (which worked out to be 83 sen per hour; by comparison, a 7-eleven worker those days earned RM 3 per hour). 8. Car loans were not extended to HO then (a year after I started work, it was rectified to allow HOs to take car loans from the government).
9. Once we, HOs, were all hauled up on Sunday to carry hospital beds/cupboards/other heavy furniture up and down a lorry because they were opening a new ward somewhere.
10. Food meant for on call HOs were usually eaten up by inconsiderate specialists and MOs who were not even on call. By the time we had time to ear, all that was left was usually white rice and nothing else.
11. As a Medical Officer (MO) in a district hospital, I was moved from one department to another, just to fill up vacancies. My plea for some training in Paediatrics was denied. To this day, I have no training in paediatrics. Instead I was moved from surgery to A&E, back to surgery, to just about any unit that has a lack of doctors. That ended when I wrote a formal letter (and cc to the State Health Department) for placement in Anaesthesia (which I subsequently did for almost 3 years)
12. The most calls I did in a month as an MO was 15 days!
13. I was denied the privilege to write insurance claims for patients as all the claims were monopolized by the Hospital Director then. FYI, an insurance claim can earn us RM 40 per claim.
14. My application to do Masters was rejected twice with no reasons given. When finally succeeded in getting in, they threatened to withdraw the seat because they found out that I was planning to leave the civil service. I finally left the service in 2000.
15. I was asked to pay rent for the house I was occupying in the hospital vicinity as well as paying for water and electricity as well.
16. Getting a house (meant for doctors) in that hospital was near impossible as the Hospital Director then favoured his office staff by allotting all the available houses to his cronies. I finally got mine after a formal letter was written, one and a half years after I moved there.
17. As a MO in Seremban Hospital, I did an entire year of MO calls and never received a sen. All because they ‘did not receive a memo from the ministry authorizing the payment’; all because I was not a government servant then! (I have no such problems in the hospital I work in now). I estimated that they owed me RM 9,000!
18. My working hours then was from 8 am to anytime between 6-8 pm daily.
19. Weekend round was a horror as an MO. My round started at 8 am and usually ended at 8 pm!
20. We had no proper on call rooms to sleep in. The available rooms have faulty locks. Our things get stolen all the time. We didn’t have lockers.
21. MOs were not allocated parking lots. So we had to come real early to get a parking lot of risk driving round and round forever or worse, be slapped with a parking ticket by the ever vigilant policemen when we park along the yellow line.
22. My call claims were never paid on time. Sometimes it would be months before we see any payment.
23. When I transferred here for the MMed program, things were not that much better. Doctors here are also not allocated parking space, they are all assigned to lecturers and professors who sometimes come to work at 11 am! Parking lots are also assigned to clerks and the like. The criteria for allotment were never explained to us.

I am certain that my experience is by no means unique. I am sure everyone in the medical profession has their own horror stories to tell.
I could go on and on of course but what I am trying to say is, “Honorable Health Minister, unless things improve for the doctors working here in Malaysia, dangling bunch of money to lure these specialists back from overseas just isn’t going to cut it.”

Anyway, RM 4000 isn’t worth the trouble, at least not in my books.