#kerajaangagal145 – The whole Cabinet should resign if it continues to show indifference and lack of seriousness about the Covid-19 pandemic and allow outstanding grievances of contract doctors to fester into Code Black and hartal events
It is heart-rending to read of the plight of the contract doctors. One of them wrote:
“I do not have job security and my future appears bleak. Because of the fact that I am not a Permanant Medical Officer, my contract may not be renewed at the whim of my employer (Ministry of Health, Malaysia) and I do not have a chance to further my studies to specialise in a Masters program.
“During this pandemic, most of the frontline doctors that the public come into contact are Contract Medical Officers. We risk our own health while donned in stuffy personal protective gear to serve our public. We have no grievances in serving the public as this is our calling.
“Seeing our patient recover is our greatest joy. Many would have seen the smile in our eyes (because we are all wearing masks) when we send our recovered patients back home. But little do people see when we silently shed tears for patients whom we fail to wrest from the hands of death.
“The public call us ‘heroes’ but I beg to disagree. We are nothing more than mere humans.
“Like everyone else, we are of flesh and blood, we laugh and we cry, there are times when we are happy and times when we are worried. We also have parents, spouses, children.
“In the midst of all this chaos, as contract doctors, we do not wish for extra pay or bonus, we do not ask for medals or recognition.
“We only ask to be converted to Permanent Medical Officers. We only ask to be able to treat our patients wholeheartedly and not worry about whether our contract will be extended/terminated the following year.
“We only ask to be treated fairly, as with our Permanent Medical Officer colleagues, so that we have a chance to specialise through a Master programme and gain more knowledge/skills to help our patients.”
Yesterday we had two bad news on the Covid-19 pandemic front – Malaysia’s plunging 35 rungs from 16th rank in January to 51st rank in the June 2021 Bloomberg Covid Resilience Ranking and Covid-19 deaths exceeding the 5,000-mark.
If there are Code Black and hartal events because of the long outstanding grievances of the contract doctors, Malaysia will again be attracting world publicity for the wrong reasons.
The time has come that the old solution of promising to look into the matter and relapsing into slumber to be abadoned, and the whole Cabinet should resign if it continues to show indifference and lack of seriousness about the Covid-19 pandemic and allow the outstanding grievances of contract doctors to fester into Code Black and hartal events.