Public healthcare is often in the news for long queues, insufficient hospital beds, and lack of clinics and some such things. Complainants? Patients.
Lately, doctors are in the news. Complainants? Doctors. "Dr " may just as well stand for "distressed".
And they are indeed one distressed lot. How could they not be distressed when work, senior doctors, and the system 'bully ' the life out of them — sometimes literally. L et's start with the issue of work.
Some doctors, especially those doing on-call duties, work between 60 and 80 hours a week without a meaningful break.
There have even been individual cases of doctors working up to 84 hours. Specialists are not exempt, but they get a "kinder " 33-hour shift, without a break. The Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) isn't pushing for a 35- or 38-hour week that Australia practises.
All it wants is the European Union's recommended 48 hours. The MMA once warned that if this trend were to continue, doctors would face the risk of serious ill nesses, such as heart disease, stroke and even death.
Despite calls to improve on-call allowances, they still have not met the MMA's expectations.
Add to this distress, bullying senior doctors. These Nebuchadnezzar-like men in stethoscopes — almost always men — believe that junior doctors can't become "re al" doctors without being put through a harsh rite of passage.
And to them, bul lying does it. But bullying is a violation of personal dignity. And it has very dangerous consequences. Some of the bullies know it and yet continue their evil ways.
While we can't say for sure, recent cases of bullying have been linked to suicides. Bullying must be treated, at the very least, as a breach of medical ethics and disciplined as such.
The MMA must do what the Bar Council is doing to wayward lawyers. Deregister them. It will be doing the medical profession and patients a great favour. They are not useful members of the medical profession. Certainly, not the ones who strut the hospital wards as Nebuchadnezzar did the streets of Babylon.
Didn't the medical schools teach these hubristic doctors to uphold ethical standards? Perhaps the Health Ministry should require them to take a modern Hippocratic oath: "I shall do by my fellow doctors as I would be done by."
Few would think of the system itself as a bully, but this is our third point. But in the case of public hospitals, the system bullies junior and senior doctors. Here digitalisation hasn't happened as it has in private hospitals. In some hospitals, even in as big a one as the Kuala Lumpur Hospital, doctors must manually record every detail of the patient's pain on paper.
Like the computer hasn't been invented. And if the patient were to visit another doctor in another department, he has to pour out his pain all over again. And the diagnosis of the previous doctor? A case of a file too far. And then there is the administrative stuff: filling up forms and approving claims, things they don't teach in medical schools.
The Health Ministry, despite limited resources, appears to be trying to relieve the stress of the doctors. As always, patients, whether doctors or otherwise, feel it to be not quick enough.