Our Prime Minister recently announced an increase in on-call claims, from RM55 to RM65 for medical and dental officers, under Budget 2025.
However, it was like an insult to health care workers when it comes to implementation. The Ministry of Health (MOH) issued a letter dated January 10, 2025, that announced the new “Waktu Bekerja Berlainan (WBB) Fasa Pertama” to be trialed in a few hospitals. This is in truth is just a shift in systems for the already strained manpower.
According to the new system, on-call claims are cancelled for weekdays, and you can only claim for being passive or active during the weekend (there is a bit of increase for the weekend). In the new system, medical officers and specialists are to do on-call duties as per the following shifts:
- Monday to Friday: 3pm to 9am the next day (18 hours) – No claim (passive claim on Friday).
- Saturday: (Shift 1) 7am to 10pm (15 hours) – Active claim, (Shift 2) 6pm to 9am the next day (15 hours) – Active claim.
- Sunday: (Shift 1) 7am to 10pm (15 hours) – Active claim. (Shift 2) 8pm to 9am the next day (13 hours) – Passive claim.
Besides the question of payment, there is a problem with the new system, as it requires a lot of manpower to fulfil the needs of shifts, and we are currently severely lacking manpower. The implementation of the new system did not take into consideration of the following:
- On-call health care workers have their own job scope. Who will be doing the work from 9am to 3pm daily?
- The new WBB system means there will be pre and post call off periods, which means there will be less people working during office hours where more manpower is needed
- The example given did not take into consideration the concurrently running Elective Operation Theatre, Daycare Operation Theatre, and Clinic and Visiting Clinic in district hospitals.
To be clear, this is what is going to happen in my department, which only has 13 medical officers handling three wards. We have three medical officers on call daily according to the current on-call system.
With the implementation of WBB, we will have six people not working during the weekday during the pre and post call off periods (9am to 3pm). This leaves us with just seven people to cover three wards, the Elective Operation Theatre, a daily clinic handling more than 100 patients, the visiting clinic at district hospitals, and those people actually doing on-call duties, which include Emergency Operation Theatre, receiving referrals and seeing patients from the Emergency Department, receiving and seeing patients referred from other departments and also from other hospitals.
As medical officers, we can’t leave immediately when our shift times are over. Ongoing surgeries can’t be halted because it’s 9am, and we can’t tell patients in the Emergency Department to “please wait for the next doctor to come as my shift is over”.
We can’t leave exactly at 9am when the clinic still has more than 100 patients waiting to be seen. So, in the end, everyone will end up working for free without being make any on-call claims. In contrast with nurses and assistant medical officers who can claim by hours, we can’t claim for any extra hours on our part.
This new system is just another poorly planned move by the MOH to save money while being able to brag that they are making improvements in terms of an increase in on-call claims. In truth, it will strain our already tired workforce and push more of us to leave the service.
The author is a medical officer at a government hospital in Perak. CodeBlue is giving the author anonymity as civil servants are prohibited from writing to the press.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
