I received a few jokes in my email recently as well as in my blog comments, regarding the quality of our current doctors. I was told that these were real incidents that happened to some of the doctors in Malaysia and if it is true, I am really speechless!! It may give us a good laugh but at times you probably have to cry thinking that these are the people who are going to treat us sooner or later. The last one for sure is a true incident in a local private university!
Incident 1:
HO#1: The bloodbank did not have any blood to send up for this patient.
MO: How can that be? No blood at all?
HO#1: No, they said completely zero. They even confirmed it with a +.
MO looks at the chart to verify. Written on the chart was O+.
Incident 2:
MO: Patient is low on Vit B12. Please order this for the patient.
The next day:
HO#2: The pharmacy did not have any Vit B12. But I took care of the problem. I gave the patient 2 doses of Vit B6.
Incident 3:
A patient with severe pleural effusion was admitted with respiratory distress. A medical officer asked a houseman whether he know how to perform a (pleural) tapping or not? Unsurprisingly, the houseman answered yes confidently. The MO then went to attend other cases.
Half an hour later, he came back and saw the houseman repeatedly “tapping” the patient’s back with his hand!
Incident 4:
A local private university was conducting their Formative OSCE examination for Year 4 students(this is a true story!!). The student suppose to interview a simulated patient(SP) for minor depression:
Med Student: Do you have any suicidal intention?
SP : No
Med Student: Why Not?
SP: @#%$^
Haha, why not?
Maybe because MACC didn’t interview him
I had a good laugh reading it. =P The 4th incident is nt uncommon among medical students. Sometimes they lack the soft skills and not tactful enough when taking history. Thus, some uni had a lecturer sit in when student clerking their patient for long cases. Bt the root of the problems are that our education system focus too much on academic result solely for admission into medical school!
Dr Pagalavan, I doesnt know how to respond for the incident 4, but i dunt recall any psychiatrist teaching me to ask “why not” wen a depression pt does not has suicidal ideation. Anyway sir, for the first 3 incident, did all that really occured in Malaysia? Did those HO manage to get thru HO’ship?
I got no idea. If I am not mistaken, it happened in Penang
it happening in all hospital nowadays…
i dont know what they’ve been learning drg meds school life…but my HOs are so blurrreddd… zero knowledge n skills
LOL! O well, the 3rd joke, perhaps the HO is confused between the terminologies used. Some countries refer pleural tap as thoracocentesis, while “tapping” could easily being thought as percussions. Haha!
As for the fourth case, well, it’s quite common i think in medschool, when the student is kinda blur and nervous as the lecturers are staring at him/her, sometimes we kinda just blurted out. I can’t imagine this happen with a real patient though, therefore we must be very focused and attentive!
As for joke 1 and 2, well, it’s something depressing if it were real. Especially #2, err..
This one is a real classic :- HO was told to take consent for lumbar puncture in the NICU. Consent form had 5 dots near the signature column. When enquired, the person had taken consent from the child, touched the childs’ fingers on the stamp pad and had it pressed on the consent form……..
speechless, really.
hi dr.pagalavan,
I just came across your blog.Your articles are very enlightening,specially those regarding our medical
healthcare system.Im still a HO,working in one of the klang valley GH.
Im interested in doing family medicine,but Im not too keen
on doing the masters programme.
Can I instead do the FRACGP programme? and is it recognized
by our MOH?And,is family medicine a good field
to pursue in Australia? i’ll be glad if you could provide some
advice regarding this.thank you so much.
Since 2008, FRACP is recognised in Malaysia but you must complete the 4 years structured programme by the Academy Of Family Physician, Malaysia. Family physicians play an important role in Australia.
its quite funny to read those stories above, though under certain circumstances, yes, we tend to do stupid things, which we’ll never imagine it!
for incedence 4, evn i’m student now, i see these mistakes as quite bad, but under pressure, i might also do it as stupid as it looked! hopefully not.
i take a good example, here in india, PG students normally rotated among themselves taking our bedside teaching classes..you know, their brains were so trained to remember things that if they present something, if you open the ref book while they’re talking, the words coming out of his/her mouth were almost exactly same with wht written in the book.
other days, the consultant was going to take a class for PG students, so he invited us, undergraduate students to join them. there, we could see how the consultant bombarding them with so many questions , until for certain questions, we felt like,,
“wat the heck these PG students couldnt answer that question, its not tht difficult for god sake! theyre so good while teaching us, why they’re so blurred now?”
after all, its pressure tht diminishing their/our abilities or logics as a human.
i’ve seen enough road accidents (not severe one) , how many person after involved in accident would park their cars on road-side? rather quickly came out of their cars in the middle of the traffic.
we, saw it from the distance n said, oh, that guy, no logic la, put ur car aside first, ur car just blocking the traffic, then gaduh la nk gaduh..
but if we’re in their position, i think we might do the same.