Opera mask

I had a this conversation with one of the very senior ward's sister (head of the nurses) who is very dedicated and experienced 2 years ago. I really respect her because she had more than 25 years working with thousand of doctors of different generation and handling millions of patient in different decades of her service. She told me that :

" As medical service provider, when you come to work, you are like wearing an opera mask with heavy make-up. Leave all your personnel's life aside. Patient life is your priority. When you get scolded by the patient or received bad complaint despite your hard work, just smile and swallow it. Keep doing your work and responsible. God will pay all your good work later"


which I, totally agreed with her and I still clearly remember each of her word.

Recently there one or two article in the news paper complaining about medical service and I suddenly recall her word again. Believe me, it is not easy handling sick patient. They need more attention than usual. With limited resources, the attention is given more to those who need more i.e more seriously ill patient. As a result, more stable patient need to wait longer time. But from my experience, most of the dissatisfaction, are caused by miss communication and misunderstanding between the health care provider and patient. At the end of the day, it is not easy to satisfied everybody no matter how hard you tried.

The next question is, why our resources are limited and why we can't practice efficient medical system as in western countries. The reason is very simple, most of medical staff are overwork, underpaid but what they get at the end of day is only series of bad complaint about them. Not fair right? So, they leave the government service as a result of their frustration. This is not my theory as it is happening in front of my eyes.

For most of western countries, medical service is paid by patient's medical insurance. So physically, every hospital is like private hospitals in Malaysia. It's totally opposite of our system where, you pay 5 ringgit and you get most of the medication FOC. If the same system implemented in Malaysia, i believe, a lot of patient is not properly treated because medical insurance itself is not cheap.

I also believe, Malaysia Ministry of Health is trying their best to improve Malaysian health system and really hoping they will give more attention to the problem when providing the service. Money is not everything.