Doctors working with the government hospitals are now urging the Malaysia government to replace the on-call allowance with overtime rate payment.

At the moment, doctors working in the hospitals receive different payment rate compared to those in government health clinics, which is considered unfair by many parties.

Those assigned in the hospitals are getting on-call allowance of RM10 per hour, while their counterparts in clinics are entitled for overtime rate of RM80 per hour.

The overtime scheme in the government health clinics was started earlier in 2008 to allow doctors working from 5pm to 9pm, which means that they can fork up RM320 for four hours of working period. The figure is in stark contract for hospital doctors, who would spend 15 hours of on-call and get merely RM150 of pay.

Discrepancy of workload also arises with the doctors in the hospitals often subject to emergency and life threatening cases whereby the latter only handle outpatient cases such as cough, cold and everyday fever. On top of that, high risk and complex cases received by the health clinics are often referred to the hospitals due to lack of expertise and facilities.

The workload problem faced by doctors in the government hospitals is not new has been subject of attention lately, and the situation is made worse with inadequate number of qualified doctors to serve the public.