Practising medicine isn’t like riding a bicycle after many years

I REFER to the article by Sarban Singh (The Star, May 30) regarding the yearly intake of housemen.

I find the claim made by Deputy Health director-general Datuk Dr S. Jeyaindran rather far-fetched, to say the least.

First of all, I don’t know where he got the idea that fresh doctors, graduating from local medical universities, are able to start their housemanship at an average of three months after graduating.

A few friends of mine who graduated in October 2016 from Universiti Malaya, the top public university in the country, began their housemanship just last week.

That’s seven months of waiting! That’s seven months after graduation.

We’ve not even taken into account the period between them completing their final exam and their graduation. I too graduated around the same time, locally of course, but I was not fortunate enough to have been selected for the recent May intake of housemen.

In the event I get in for the next intake, that would mean that I would have waited practically an entire year between I last set foot in a hospital and commence my posting.

How can he consider the situation to be “manageable”? And even IF his statement were true, how can such an accomplished medical professional not realise the need for doctors to regularly and constantly be in touch with their craft?

Three months of zero practice is by no means short.

And don’t get me started on all the ragging and scolding we’ll have to endure once we start because of “our incompetence”. Medicine isn’t “just like riding a bicycle”.

Again, how is the situation “manageable” when we, the graduates, are subjected to ridiculously non-standardised interviews (I was asked whether I follow the Director General and Minister of Health on Facebook) and the “results” of such interviews are then used to rank us and subsequently determine our intake order.

And once again, how is the situation “manageable” when publicly funded graduates (JPA scholars) are more or less thrown to the wind after the Government spent millions of ringgit to train them yearly.

A couple of my friends from the Perdana University, who were on scholarships worth around RM800k per person, finished their finals in May 2016 and were only accepted for houseman training in this year, that is, after a year of waiting.

With the contract system in play now, what happens to these graduates if they don’t get through their housemanship period within the allocated three years?

With all of these problems, how can anyone claim that the situation is even remotely near “manageable”?

DISGRUNTLED MEDICAL GRAD

Subang Jaya