In a short word, it is extremely busy and stressful.
Once you graduated from a medical school, you need to work for at least 2 years as a houseman (junior doctor) before you can pursue further specialisation in medical field. That is the scenario in Malaysia.
Within these 2 years, you need to do 6 postings which are Medicine, Surgery, Orthopaedic, Obstetric and Gynaecology, Paediatrics, Accident and Emergency (A&E). This year, the Ministry of Health introduce the seventh posting which is Anaesthetic. You can choose either to do Anaesthetic or A&E as your final posting. If you choose Anaesthetic as your last posting, you will be automatically being absorbed into Anaesthetic department once you finished your housemanship years.
How is the routine lifestyle as a junior doctor? Depending on which posting you do, you can either start working as early as 4-5 am or come to the hospital around 7am. You typically finish your work by 10-11pm every day. Although there are few postings where you finish your job by 5pm and you can go home to rest in bed.
In term of oncall, basically you start your work as usual and continue working throughout the night and finish the on-call period by the end of next day. If your routine working day finished at 10pm, then your oncall finish at 10pm the next day. Sometimes where the oncall is not that busy, you may get few hours of sleep. Otherwise you won't be able to sleep at all for the next 36-48 hours. You will be extremely sleep deprived by the end of your oncall.
Despite that, the situation in Malaysia is improving. There are more doctors graduating from various medical schools in Malaysia to some extent, there has been rumours that doctors may be jobless within the next few years due to the sheer number of doctors in Malaysia.
Will continue writing about this some time later. I have to sleep early tonight as I will be oncall tomorrow.
