KUALA LUMPUR, March 28 — Universiti Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC) is currently facing a shortage of about two-thirds of its allocated quota of 400 house officers (HOs) assigned by the Ministry of Health (MOH).
Higher Education Minister Zambry Abdul Kadir said UMMC, a quartenary hospital in the Klang Valley, was allocated 400 HO positions under a “contract of service” funded through the OS29000 allocation from the Ministry of Health Malaysia (MOH).
“As of January 31, 2024, the total number of filled HO positions at UMMC is 143. This leaves 257 HO positions (64.3 per cent) at UMMC vacant. In this regard, UMMC requires at least 276 to 345 HOs to provide optimum services,” Zambry told Puchong MP Yeo Bee Yin in a written Dewan Rakyat reply on March 12.
The higher education minister also denied that a “Zero HO Protocol” was formally implemented in the university hospital, saying instead that it merely referred to “potential adjustments” to deal with a shortage of housemen.
“The term ‘Zero HO Protocol’ has never been part of the hospital’s operational procedures before. It was coined recently to suggest potential adjustments in daily task management to tackle the house officer shortage at UMMC,” said Zambry.
“UMMC has never initiated a Zero HO Protocol at the hospital. This is because UMMC is dedicated to upholding its role as a university teaching hospital (HPU), even in the face of the current house officer shortages.”
CodeBlue reported in January a “dire shortage” of house officers and medical officers at UMMC’s Department of Medicine (DOM), the largest department at the university hospital, prompting the department’s acting head to call for a “Zero HO Protocol”, urging staff to operate under the assumption that the services of trainee doctors are no longer available.
The protocol involves smaller units forgoing house officer services, prioritising house officers in high workload units like respiratory medicine and infectious diseases, discontinuing “indiscriminate” test requests, and practising “mindfulness” in admitting patients.
The medicine department was also in the process of cutting certain services and collecting reported cases of “suboptimal care, near-misses, or morbidities” that have occurred as a direct or indirect result of the “severe” manpower shortage.
Separately, CodeBlue reported last January that Health director-general Dr Muhammad Radzi Abu Hassan acknowledged a decline in house officer appointments since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
With housemen appointments decreasing by nearly 50 per cent from 6,136 in 2019 to 3,271 in 2023, the ministry has opted to allocate trainee doctor placements exclusively to state hospitals, Kuala Lumpur Hospital (HKL), and university teaching hospitals. District hospitals are excluded from the first intake of housemen placements for this year.
