Oncalls

Once again i am saddened by a news that one of my friend has decided to quit..Just recently, I was informed of another friend had taken a long leave..

And from my previous posting, the talk about quitting and taking unpaid months of leave had already been heard of...

I myself have thought about quitting this job many times...

I dont know whether this kind of phenomena is common amongst other profession?

Many of us cannot stand the workload, the stress and also sometimes the specialist/MO/consultants..

The oncalls are one of the worst nightmares as doctors..

The feeling of precalls and also postcalls are pure torture..

Let me describe how is an oncall for us..
We would start work as usual - at 8..(officially)...but of course, that would have disasterous effect on us if we do that..When I had to take care of the wards, I usually would arrive by 7am..

We have to cover all the patients before 8 am..so..if there are a lot of patients and if the grand round is that day..most of us would make sure that we arrive at the hospital by 6,30am..

THus, we work as usual..until 5pm..(rarely we get to go back by this time)..but for those oncalls they would have to stayback and continue until the next day...without gap..

the oncall ends at about 7:30 the next day..but we have to go on working for the next workign day..so starts again at 8am til 5pm...
Basically an oncall commences from 8am until 5pm the next day..if you're lucky that is..there have been many times that i had to stay back until about 7pm..so in general an oncall lasts about 32 hours..working nonstop....

for an House officer, the oncall claims amount to about rm 100 for weekdays and rm 110 for a weekend..it used to be that you get only rm25 for an oncall.. Thus in reality we get about less than rm 5 per hour.. talk about expensive labor..

This month i have to do 9 oncalls.about every 3 days, i would have to be oncall..

What a life...