issues in a-tiss-shoo!

woke up with a headache. had a cup of milo and off to work. after the ward round, had a sardin roll and nearly half a glass of plain water. tak sempat nak minum banyak coz the water was so hot, and the clinic needs me badly.

my clinic was as usual... tenang dalam kalut. there's a lot of multitasking in our department, ending up with only 3 or 4 doctors running the general clinic. to make things worse, i had to attend 4 socso board cases. my head was throbbing with pain. and the surgeon in the OT wanted another MO up there.

the poor, elongated terengganu state has only one government eye center. and ophthalmology needs extra skills and expertise in which only the eye trained doctors can see ophthal patients. we cannot discharge our patients to the district hosp out patients dept, or health clinics. meaning that all eye cases need to be seen by us.

so, we have a large crowd of patients as compared to other specialist clinics. most of these people are the elderly, and quite many of them are children. even though they were given staggered appointments, they still come at their own time. they came from far, and some need special transportation arrangement to come to KT. rejecting them when they come late, is sometimes a sin.

so... there were many patients, and few doctors. hence, the long waiting time.

and the higher people still wants us to explain why the waiting time is long.

even primary school children can do the simple maths. simple logic. no lengthy reasoning.

we have to optimize our services within the given resources. manpower issues would be considered a universal problem and should not be an issue. we should be creative and innovative enough to find ways to optimize the waiting time. fine.

over the years, we have done so much to reduce the waiting time. but sometimes, i think we are too optimistic, ambitious and idealistic. yes, everything would look nice on paper, and should work well in an ideal setting. but we are far from that.. we are so far from being ideal.

can we look at this issue in a more practical way? to me, putting a blame only on the worker bees is not fair, especially when the queen bee always kept herself hidden in the honey comb.

arghh... we do need a paradigm shift! all of us..