Healthcare red alert
How to let issues become crises
MALAYSIA’s public healthcare is on code red, a crisis mode that may be spiralling out of control. So says CodeBlue, a health portal, following an analysis of responses from 1,652 public health officers, including doctors and nurses, in a nationwide survey conducted from Jan 11 to Jan 24. We are not surprised. A couple of NST Leaders in the recent past had highlighted the brewing danger. The Health Ministry mustn’t dismiss the survey results as the voices of a disgruntled few. Sure, a survey of 1,652 doesn’t represent the entire public healthcare workforce, but it is a significant sample, statistically speaking. CodeBlue’s sample size is even larger than the one polled by YouGov, a British pollster, among National Health Service workers in Britain. Admittedly, there would be potential self-selection bias as social network respondents tend to share similar opinion. CodeBlue openly acknowledges this. And the survey title: “Dissatisfaction among healthcare professionals and workers in Malaysia’s healthcare services” is certainly of no help. Be that as it may, the ministry mustn’t turn a deaf ear to the cry for help. Granted many of the problems are old, but the bureaucracy that the public service is tends to bury rather than rush to resolve them. This must be unlearned. Business as usual is to turn issues into crises.
We are aware that Health Minister Dr Zaliha Mustafa is pushing the Finance Ministry to give the public healthcare service more money to resolve its many issues. Welcome news, no doubt. But the code red isn’t just about money. It is money and more. Granted more money means more hospitals, better facilities and more manpower. But money can’t buy everything. Take the long hours doctors are asked to work. This points to two things. One, we just don’t have enough doctors in our public healthcare service. Yet, Parliament was told in August 2020 that we had one doctor for every 186 people. The very long queues in public hospitals and clinics throughout the country gives the ratio a lie.
Two, there are top specialists who love bullying housemen and medical officers. Money may help in curing the former, but not the latter. The CodeBlue survey can be read in many ways. Those who are on the receiving end would say that the responses are mere grouses from a disgruntled few. Our response is this: 1,652 isn’t a few, disgruntled though they may be. Dismissing them so would only force many — 73 per cent, according to the survey — to quit the service. Another 50 per cent are saying they may go on strike if nothing is done. If this isn’t a crisis, we don’t know what is. CodeBlue and other polls of earlier vintage point to one thing: people who matter are not managing issues as they should be. Time is of the essence. Overworked doctors are dangerous men and women with stethoscopes. Exhausted eyes, ears and hands are likely to get the diagnosis wrong. And wrong diagnosis may mean disaster for patients. But don’t get us wrong. We aren’t saying the Health Ministry isn’t doing anything. We know it is on a fund hunt. We also know that it is scripting a white paper on the many problems that are filling its issues bank to the brim. Doing it is one thing, doing it timeously is another.
CodeBlue and other polls of earlier vintage point to one thing: people who matter are not managing issues as they should be.