Doctors should indeed serve the public. But public service is not a lifetime subscription to exhaustion, insecurity and moral blackmail.
The argument that doctors received subsidised education is true — but so did teachers, engineers, civil servants and politicians. Taxpayers fund education because an educated population benefits society. That investment is not a personal debt collectors can invoke whenever workers ask for fair treatment.
Doctors repay society every day: through long shifts, night calls, delayed leave, missed family events and responsibility for decisions that can mean life or death. Medical officers may receive only RM9.16 an hour for active on-call duty, while some have reportedly worked 33 or 36 hours without meaningful rest.
Of course, doctors are not uniquely important. Nurses, paramedics, pharmacists, teachers, firefighters and many others deserve better conditions too. But fairness is not a competition in suffering. The answer to one profession’s problems is not to point at another and say, “They have it worse.”
Nor does a pension, a possible promotion or permission to do locum work magically cancel out poor working conditions. Benefits are part of remuneration, not charity. And postgraduate training is not a favour if the health system needs specialists to keep functioning.
The most revealing claim is that doctors should have known what they were signing up for. By that logic, the government should never improve any public-sector job because employees were supposedly warned in advance. People enter medicine to care for patients, not to consent to indefinite understaffing, opaque career pathways and compensation that fails to reflect the hours demanded.
Doctors are also told to leave if they are unhappy. That is technically true. But when enough doctors leave, patients wait longer, remaining staff burn out, and the public system becomes even more fragile. Retention is not a favour to doctors; it is basic workforce planning.
A grateful doctor is not necessarily a silent doctor. In fact, the doctors who complain may be the ones most committed to saving the public system. They are warning that patriotism cannot substitute for staffing, equipment, rest and fair pay.
The public does not need doctors who are grateful merely to have jobs. It needs a health service that respects the people entrusted with keeping Malaysians alive.
Doctors owe the public good care. The government owes both doctors and patients a system capable of delivering it. That is not ingratitude. It is accountability.