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KOTA BHARU — The Pas Muslimat Council has called for the government to establish a National Safe Working Hours Framework for healthcare workers, saying working hours should be treated as a patient safety and workforce sustainability issue.
Its representative Wan Syahirah Wan Jafri said long working hours, staff shortages and heavy on-call workloads could lead to fatigue and burnout, affecting the welfare of healthcare workers, clinical performance and patient safety.
She said the issue could not be resolved simply by reducing working hours or changing duty schedules without addressing the root cause of whether there were enough healthcare workers to meet workload and service demands.
“If there are not enough workers, reducing working hours will simply shift the workload onto other staff,” she said during the 72nd Pas Annual Muktamar at Pusat Tarbiyah Islam Kelantan in Pengkalan Chepa, here today.
She proposed that the Health Ministry establish national standards covering working hours, on-call duties, limits on continuous working hours, minimum rest periods after on-call duties, post-call protections and monitoring of actual overtime.
She also called for a National Health Workforce Supply and Demand plan, including transparent projections of healthcare workforce requirements over the next five to 10 years.
The plan should cover doctors, nurses, pharmacists and allied health professionals, as well as regularly updated information on vacancies and workforce requirements, she said.
She also called for minimum safe staffing levels to be determined based on workload and actual service demand rather than simply the number of positions available.
She said factors including patient numbers, the severity and complexity of cases, procedures performed, operating hours and on-call workloads should be taken into account.
"Workforce retention and wellbeing should become key performance indicators for the Health Ministry, including staff turnover, resignations, vacancy rates, overtime, burnout and retention rates.
"We also call for the national healthcare task audit to identify and reduce administrative duties that do not require clinical expertise.
"The roles of doctors, nurses and allied health professionals should be optimised according to their respective competencies through digitalisation, information technology systems, administrative support, automation and better distribution of tasks.
"This is not a demand to work less. It is a demand to work more safely, productively and effectively," she said.
She said Malaysia needed a healthcare system with not only sufficient hospitals and facilities, but also enough competent healthcare workers who were not pushed to the point where the system itself became unsafe.
