I just had quite a long day, and it hasn't even ended yet. A few more hours before I can have a proper rest..so this post is inspired from what I just went through today..
What is it like to be a dental officer, working in the non-private sector?
Well, I must say, it is quite hectic. There are times when the clinic get pretty busy and we were flooded with patients. Sometimes we can predict when will THE busy day be. Normally on Sundays - since the state govt hasn't unified the weekend so the private sector people used this chance to get treatment on Sundays. Also people tend to go after a long weekend, like today or before a long weekend - ya know just in case things went wrong during the weekend. And some MC seekers of course love Mondays to go for treatment of the teeth that might have been rotten months ago.....
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| The patients I saw today.. |
During THE busy day - it gets pretty tiring. We usually see at least 30 patient in the morning - that's from 8.15am when we usually start calling in the patient up until 1pm which is about 5 hours or 300 minutes which leave us on average around 10 minutes to spare between each patient. That means no visit to toilet, no take 5, no drinks in between. And things might take longer to get done with - extraction might be harder, tooth fracture, scaling calculus that has been around for a year or so might take ages to remove and patient...oh some patients have really bad gag reflex that they need to spit out the water every 30 seconds or so..
With abundance of patient and limited time to spend on each of them we turn into heartless robot. No small chit-chat. No asking how's your day. And to some point it is hard even to carve a smile after a tiring day. The minute they step in I would straight away "what would you like to do today" and just go on start away doing the treatment. Sometimes I get a very, unaware patient with abundant calculus but wanted to get their teeth straightened. Sometimes I get patient with tiny hole in the tooth but insisted on extraction. Sometimes I get patient with a tooth very loose but insisted on getting a filling done where no hole is present at all. And all of this has slowly turn me into a very easily annoyed person and lost my cool quite a lot.
So one might question how come there is a big difference between a private and non-private dental practice? The cost of dental equipments are not cheap at all. The instruments needed to be cleaned, properly disinfected and sterilized and each and every
cleaning tool are expensive. In government we normally do one treatment per visit due to the time constraint but you get to do as much treatment as you want in private dental practice. And in private practice, we get paid for the level of difficulty of the treatment done, especially during extractions. Trust me, taking one tooth out is not easy, especially the non-loose ones. I get muscle sore often from working and had to spend on some good body massage to recover. On the other hand, government dental practice had all the equipment subsidized by the government and our pay is fixed no matter how many or how little we did..and that explains why I am still working past 5pm, I needed to work a bit harder to earn a little more to accommodate my life -__-"
Sometimes on job not properly done, it haunts me. Sometimes I wish we had more dental chairs in the clinic (the non-private one) to meet the high demands. Forgive me my patients for sometimes not doing a nicely carved fillings. For not smiling or not entertaining your stories.
I also wish that the level of awareness among Malaysians on their oral health increases. One with easy access to internet can get all the information within seconds but how about the pakciks and makciks at the kampungs? We do, have visit or program from time to time but I still feel more needed to be done as I see lots of patient with very bad condition coming sometimes a little to late to do anything..
With that said here's a secret for everyone to know to get an optimum oral hygiene - BRUSH YOUR TEETH WELL. BRUSH IT PROPERLY and you could save all the extra ringgits for something else...
