I am a houseman at Tuanku Jaafar Seremban Hospital (HTJS) currently in my first posting at the medical department. I should actually be in my second posting now, but there were some issues regarding our e-logbook that made our superiors from medical to take us back to medical.
This all unraveled when housemans from the pediatric posting had some problem with their e-logbooks where it was found that some house officers (HOs) had been using medical officers’ (MOs) account to approve their logbook procedures.
This subsequently caused a domino effect on all the other departments, whereby they started to investigate housemen who were finishing the current posting for the same issue. From what I heard, HOs who were previously from paediatric posting (and had moved on to ED posting) were called back to paeds.
They were given time to redo their logbooks and were able to return to their next posting in three weeks.
My friends in O&G posting were extended two months; some were free to move on to their next posting after a thorough investigation. This also applied to my friends in surgical posting. They were only extended by two weeks to allow time for investigation.
However, for the medical department, we have been back to this posting for almost one month now without any proper updates from our superiors. They claim that they are awaiting a decision from the Ministry of Health (MOH) and management.
But I heard from a friend that the director of the hospital claimed that the issue had been resolved and investigations are all done. Yet we were not informed of any updates on whether we are extended or if we are free to move on to the next posting.
I’d like to put out a disclaimer that I did not take part in using any MOs’ account to approve my procedures. Therefore I feel like I am being wrongly punished for something I didn’t do. We are already approaching the point where the people who had entered the posting after us are almost done with their posting.
Yet we are still stuck in this department with no news.
It’s taking a toll on the mental health of all housemen in this hospital because not only are we behind our other batchmates, other departments are severely lacking in HOs due to this issue and prolonged so-called investigation.
Apparently the medical department only sent its report to MOH on April 28. This is really unacceptable because we submitted our explanation letter on April 10 and they had interviewed us one by one on April 8, which means it’s taken them almost a month to even submit the report to MOH.
Meanwhile, our superiors have been saying they’ve been waiting for MOH’s decision for a while now.
CodeBlue, which has requested comments from HTJS, is providing the author anonymity because 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.
