Jauh Perjalanan Luas Pengalaman...or something to that effect.

I've been attached at Hospital Kemaman for my summer intern-ship for four days now. It's a little better than last year since I got posted in the Emergency Department which has so much more things to do than the wards. Or so my limited experience tells me. A lot of scary stories about the prospect of the future Malaysian medical world there! People have been telling me we're over-crowded with doctors for years now but I prefer to see what happens rather than worry for the next four years about securing a job or not once I graduate. I have no intention of working overseas at the moment so admittedly, the thought of not being welcomed here in Malaysia worries me a bit. It confuses me too. I mean, the government has spent millions of Ringgit on a single medical student alone and yet they say these people are not qualified to work in Malaysia. After millions of Ringgit spent. So you just have to ask, is it the government officials fault for choosing crappy universities, the hospitals' fault for not having the expertise i.e. enough doctors to train housemen which I kind of doubt...Or back to the government for giving out too many medical scholarships? But then, even if they didn't give out scholarships, those who really want to do medicine would still be doing medicine anyway. We'd still be churning out more and more doctors. They'd still have to do the mandatory three years. Or so I'm told. Well, sometimes more like scared into believing.

Unless of course, the scholars chose to take medicine not because that's what they intend on doing but due to other pressures. Which I believe, could easily be half of the cases. Sad but true. We Malaysians have this very shallow view of what smart is. The smart people in high school who got good results for PMR are automatically sent to the science stream. Even if some of them prefer the arts, they are pressured into taking the sciences cause if they join the arts class, they'll be mingling with the wrong type of people, it'll be a more different study environment. Please get what I mean... So we end up with Malaysians doing things they don't really want to do just because that's where society placed them by default. These arts people will end up in sectors like law and policy-making (whatever those jobs are called), good for them! But these science people who take medicine and all the 'new' majors like biotechnology and bioinformatics, where would they be? We're all fed these ideas and ambition of building a modern 'scientific' country but we don't even have enough jobs to cater the grads? Really? I might be wrong. The whole country could dramatically change in the next two,three years or so! But right now all we're hearing, at least, all the med students are hearing, is bad news and different changing policies every day.

Well, then this doctor told us today, It's the individual's fault isn't it, if they are not qualified as medical officers? It's so wrong for hospitals and the Jabatan Kesihatan to automatically regard grads of a certain university/from a certain country as all unqualified to work in Malaysia. 
True. I mean, we've been studying pretty much the same subjects for six frikkin years. You must come out with something to be certified as doctors from the university. So if you asked me, I never blame the universities for being crappy. Who do you think you are if you consider yourself worthy of condemning a university? A little respect goes a long way.

Hospital Kemaman

I did my summer internship at this hospital last month.

I did ponteng a few times but I had a good enough excuse which i shall not disclose here.

It's not half bad actually.

I hung out mostly in ward number 3 with a really sarcastic doctor whose name I shall not disclose here. An orang luar i'd imagine so he doesn't speak 'terengganu' and he has no idea what Tioxide and Lot 144 is (tsk tsk).But you can tell he's a really respected doctor. And unlike the other doctors he actually acknowledged my existence and bullied me around. Which is good at times. 

He even asked me how many lungs the human body has. It was all good natured ribbing.

I did learn quite a lot. 

The hospital is really calm cause most special cases don't get admitted there, it's always been that way. Not enough equipment I guess,cause I believe the expertise is there.

Anyways,I now know how to differentiate a vein from an artery using an ultrasound machine.

I know where you're supposed to put the little knob things on the patient when doing an ECG.

I know how to wash your hands properly using the 7 steps and I know that when you're opening stitches, you have to cut the 'thread' from the sides so it wouldn't hurt the patient much when you pull it out. Not that I got to do any of that. It's all the government policy. I get it. I wouldn't want first year medical students to touch me if I was the patient either. 

And I learned about the administrative structure of the hospital, basic stuff like that. 

The hospital is only now just starting to accept housemen so the staff are all really excited about it. 

They're all really nice to the housemen,none of all the nightmarish 'bekeng' nurses and matron stories. and the doctor recommended me to do my housemanship at Hosiptal Kemaman cause he said teaching hospitals are usually overcrowded so they don't allow housemen to do anything. Like,in a team, there's usually two specialists,two medical officers,two residents and a few house officers. So of course, the residents and medical officers will only let the housemen observe most of the cases. But in Hospital Kemaman, there's one specialist,one MO and two housemen in a team. So you can imagine the difference. 

Hospital Kemaman is supposed to get a new building soon I was told. A bigger one with more sub-specialties and departments. Right now, there's only one ward for male patients. that means all the cases for males are in that ward. No different ward for orthopedics or infectious diseases. But it's all good. 

At least I got to see all the cases in one ward.

It was a good experience. But I just wish I didn't have to go through it again all by myself next year.

-The Chukai Insider