When nearly three hundred doctors did not report for duty in Sarawak on October 1, 2025, the judgement was swift. Words like irresponsible, unprofessional, ungrateful began to surface.
But the truth is simpler and harder: this is not about defiance. It is about exhaustion. It is about a system that has stopped seeing the very people it depends on.
Sarawak’s doctor shortage is not new. It is chronic, deep-rooted, and worsened by policies that treat doctors as replaceable parts rather than people with lives tethered to families, finances, and futures.
These are doctors who have weathered years of uncertainty — from the contract system that left many in professional limbo, to the relentless hours in overcrowded hospitals where compassion is expected to thrive even when resources do not.
To ask them now to uproot their lives and serve in under-equipped, under-supported settings without adequate incentives or security is not patriotism — it is exploitation disguised as duty.
Many of these doctors want to serve. They entered medicine with purpose. But purpose alone cannot sustain a person forever.
When the system fails to keep its promises, when salaries stagnate, when relocation allowances barely cover the move, when career progression is opaque and arbitrary — what remains of loyalty except fatigue?
This is not rebellion. It is self-preservation.
And if I were to list all the times doctors have been disregarded, dismissed, or failed by the system, we would be reading into the next page, and still not reach the end.
From broken promises of permanent posts to endless nights of unpaid overtime, from lack of basic safety and amenities in rural clinics to policies that pretend resilience is infinite — the ledger of neglect runs long. Every line in it represents someone who stayed despite having every reason to leave.
I have seen it happen. Doctors are giving up quietly. They are tired. They have stopped believing. I am one. I walked away. It was not easy to leave home, but I walked away because to stay was to sell my self-worth.
And it should worry us deeply that it has come to this, because this is how systems unravel. We saw it during the pandemic in India, when exhausted doctors begged for oxygen and rest, when the weight of an entire nation’s health fell upon shoulders already breaking.
France for it’s myriads of problems in recent years got one thing right. It knew how to acknowledge those who carried the country through the pandemic- including the doctors.
Much as it happened in our country; our doctors too were there right at the frontline.
Our reward? I leave it to the reader’s imagination.
Collapse never begins with chaos; it begins when the ones holding the system together quietly give up believing it will change.
The absence of 293 doctors is not the problem. It is the symptom of one, indicative of a cultural mindset that seems to think the Hippocratic Oath is somehow an oath doctors take to stop expecting basic human rights and dignity.
A mindset where politicians can shamelessly claim that doctors are “better off” because they keep all their salary, as if financial security absolves a system of responsibility.
Then again, what financial security? If that existed, why are so many doctors driving Myvis? Why have some gone to the extent of pawning their jewellery when told to move to underserved posts across the sea, as has happened in the past?
This is not just mismanagement; it is a failure to value the people who keep the system alive. In stark contrast, we have foreign nations offering lucrative amounts as part of relocation fees to get our doctors into their system.
And mistake me not, Malaysian doctors are an asset wherever they go.
Our work ethics and our capacity to slog are such.
If Malaysia wishes to safeguard its health care system, it must begin by valuing the people who sustain it, not in speeches, but in structure.
Doctors must be given dignity, fair pay, humane hours, and real autonomy. They should be respected, not as instruments of policy, but as professionals who have already sacrificed too much.
Because every time a doctor walks away — be it into private practice, to a foreign country, or out of medicine altogether — something vital leaves with them: experience, compassion, hope.
Look away now, and the system will not just strain. It will collapse. It is headed there.
Dr Loshi Rajen is a former Ministry of Health doctor.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
