Irony writ large

It's been a strange week. A second institution of public character fell from grace, when the Commissioner of Charities revealed that half the funds raised went into paying the big, fat paycheck of its CEO, even as The Straits Times ran a huge feature on underpaid social workers, who, like the charities, serve those on whom Lady Luck/Lady Grace/Lady Comfort haven't smiled.

This year, it's Youth Challenge. Not too long ago (and the trial is still on-going), it was the National Kidney Foundation.

What's it with people who are supposed to be custodians of charities? Fine, not all are bad apples. But two cases in as many years? I wouldn't blame humans for having their faith in charities and their fund raising efforts shaken to the core.

They will think twice about donating now, because they can't be sure where their hard-earned - but willingly shared - earnings will end up. And people like my human, who used to help raise funds for NKF (by milking her fellow journalists!) will wonder why they bothered volunteering to help. My human quit collecting donations when the rumours about T. T. Durai started surfacing. Her colleagues were telling her that they didn't trust the man, making it simply too hard for her to continue.

On the other end of the scale, we've got society's bleeding hearts - the social workers who toil on in their backbreaking and emotionally draining careers for pitiful salaries.

Ask them why they do it - when they must have at least once looked askance at their former classmates or friends of the same age who are earning twice, three times as much - and they will say 'It's my calling'.

Sure, that sounds noble, very noble. But for the kind of helpful, comforting and healing work they do... they should be paid more, far more. And to think that many have degrees or special qualifications in social work too. They should be right up there with other professionals.

But think again, where are these social workers based? Answer: Usually in charities, or community organisations, who can ill afford to pay fat salaries.

... which is why it is infuriating when you have CEOs of charities who see fit to dip into the kitty to line their own pockets. It's been found that, in addition to his monthly paycheck, Vincent Lam of Youth Challenge has been getting gratuities every five years - gratuities calculated based on between 7 and 10 per cent of his total salary over the preceding five years!

Lord Almighty!! The outrage over this factoid is not going to be any less than the storm which greeted Mr Durai when news of his first-class plane travel and fat pay checks came to light.

Bleeding heart social workers, underpaid ... vs Slick charity CEOs who find ways to pay themselves. Oh yeah, to them, charity PAYS, and it starts - not at home - but right in the charity's coffers.

May they look into their hearts and be burned up by guilt all their lives.

Calling Singapore doctors...

How much of your curriculum time in med school is given to teaching the softer side of the science of patient care, hmmm?

OK, let's back track a bit: Do you think that being sensitive to a patient's fears and insecurities can be taught at all? Or is it a function of how much of a human being you are?

I ask because I've seldom seen my human so angry. She had just come from her annual physical, upset with the way the doctor treated her. He was cold, impersonal, cursory and offered little by way of assurance, considering that it had been 10 years or more since her last physical. (The hypochondriac that she is, she was imagining she had all kinds of illnesses, waiting to be uncovered.)

Dr N was also plain insensitive and also criticised the judgement of my human's other doctors along the way, which is a shamefully unprofessional thing to do. He gets a F for bedside manner, in short.

Maybe he had personal problems. Or his favourite prata man didn't make his prata just the way he liked it that morning. Or maybe he was plain frustrated at being a GP, stuck in an endless cycle of examining executives day in, day out, when he really, really wanted to be a top-flight, big-bucks brain surgeon. But all these don't qualify as excuses to abuse patients.

I don't need to go into details here about Dr N and what went on during the consultation, but suffice to say, the chappie needs to re-read the code of ethics for doctors found on the Singapore Medical Council's website. (If you ask my human, she thinks he ought to have his bonus docked and to be given a warning letter, if not also fired.)

This calls to mind a letter that was written to The Straits Times Forum page not long ago, in which the writer told of the night his father died in A&E after being admitted with chest pains.

After the requisite life-saving measures had failed and time of death had been called, the doctor went out to the waiting room and announced baldly to the deceased's son: "Your father has flat-lined."

Flat-lined? FLAT-LINED?? Sure, if a doctor told me that, I'd know what he meant, but couldn't he have put it in a more humane way? It seemed to be lost on the doctor that although he had just lost a "patient", or just had a "case" die on him, someone out there had lost a Loved One. Surely the same news could be delivered in a more compassionate way?

The NUS med school must have a secret pod of alien eggs, hatching out these "physicians".

Anyway, my human was told that Dr N would be "counselled". She had asked the boss of the health-screening clinic whether Dr N would be ticked off, but the boss - a doctor himself - said he would get HR to "counsel" him, "because we are doctors first, not administrators".

Oh no, doctors don't deal with ticking off one of their own. Let the HR people do it.

To appease my human, this boss bought her a CAKE, and thanked her for her "feedback". He even admitted to my human that he believed her story because other patients have complained about Dr N before!

Well, does he intend to go all over Singapore delivering cake and doing crisis Patient Relations to cover for the doctor who consistently falls short of the requirements necessary to be one, and falls short even of the requirements to be a human being?

Get rid of the scumbag, I say.