Karapitiya cries out for post-intern medical officers

The Karapitiya Teaching Hospital is one of the major hospitals in Sri Lanka and the only hospital where most of the specialities are available for the Southern Province. The services provided by the hospital are deteriorating due to the severe shortage of medical officers.

The main reason for this is the reduction of recruiting post intern medical officers to the hospital in the past couple of years. There are several types of lists issued by the Ministry of Health to appoint medical officers according to the medical officers' transfer scheme such as the post-intern list, annual transfer list and special appeal list.

Out of these the post intern list is the most important list to supply medical officers to units with a severe shortage of medical officers. The reason for this is that the number of vacancies in this list is equal to the number of medical officers who are getting appointed as post intern medical officers. And therefore each and every advertised vacancy is filled.

Units with heavy workloads are never applied for by medical officers even though they are advertised in the annual transfer list or any other special list and these units suffer a severe shortage throughout the year inconveniencing the public.

The Ministry of Health seems to be having a poor understanding of the problem and keeps on advertising units with heavy work loads in lists other than the post intern medical officers’ vacancy list.

Because of this some important units such as Orthopaedic, Neurosurgery, Paediatrics and OPD etc in the Teaching Hospital Karapitiya are suffering, and services are deteriorating rapidly.

The authorities should take immediate steps to overcome this problem.

By A.L. Ratnayake, Galle