There was a recent viral incident involving a medical officer in Kuching, who was forced to have a “bring your sick child to work” day as his quarantine leave was denied.
The Sarawak state health department (JKN) posted a dismal response on its official website, explaining that the medical officer was called back to work as the Klinik Kesihatan had a “critical manpower shortage” due to ongoing high profile events, including our biennial Sukma 2024.
Of note, this particular KK (and many others in Sarawak) are currently in a janitor-less situation, as there was failure of contract renewal of cleaning services. The temporary solution was for clinical staff to perform the cleaning duties. One cannot help but wonder, is this not a failure at an administrative level?
Our major tertiary hospital in Kuching, already short-staffed, had a significant exodus of medical officers as a large batch of floating MOs received their placement and were posted out to district (typical inopportune timing). At the same time, Sarawak received athletes from all over Malaysia for the biennial Sukma event.
This was perhaps a questionable decision to host the Games again within a mere span of eight years, as Sarawak last hosted the 18th Games in 2016, just three Games ago. The number of participating athletes grew exponentially, from 5,670 in 2016, to 6694 in 2022, then to a whopping 9,927 athletes this year, with a concurrent marked increase in sports competed, from 426 events in 31 sports to 488 events in 37 sports.
In contrast, the recently-concluded Paris Olympic Games had 11,040 participating athletes and featured 329 events in 32 sports.
A formal memo was sent out to public health care centres in Sarawak last month, ordering health care facilities under the Ministry of Health (MOH) to provide a “laluan khas” (special pathway) to enable faster treatment for athletes. The Sukma Games itself will run from August 17 to 24, but the “laluan khas” would be effective from August 11 to 25.
In addition, several health care facilities had to deploy staff to the event venue itself. Recently, complaints were lodged when an athlete received “delayed” treatment, necessitating a special meeting that concluded with new paperwork, protocols and workflow to enable Sukma athletes to receive faster treatment.
It is a strange world indeed, when sportspeople (all 9,927 of them?) are given VIP treatment, but health care staff are not allowed the “luxury” of quarantine leave when their child has an infectious disease.
Most of us support the athletes in their endeavours, but one cannot help but wonder if this is getting out of hand.
Perhaps this would have been a good time to request for more medical manpower to our region and utilise preexisting human resources wisely, rather than put up this macho act of saving face.
CodeBlue is providing the author anonymity because civil servants are prohibited from writing to the press. The author is a medical officer at a public health care facility in Sarawak.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
