Singapore’s obsession with paper qualifications doesn’t stop at educational certificates.
Now, it’s causing a logjam at clinics and hospitals because many of the thousands testing positive for Covid-19 each day are queuing up to get MCs or medical certificates to hand their employers.
Never mind that Manpower Minister Tan See Leng had said clearly and publicly on Tuesday that all employers should not ask for MCs from workers who test positive for Covid-19, and should just excuse them for work for the periods required.
So prolific Facebook pundit Madam Ho Ching, who chairs the Temasek Trust and is the wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, decided to make that point abundantly clear.
She also gave a clear and unambiguous explanation of why she was so insistent that employers, HR managers, and workplace supervisors not ask their staff for MCs certifying that they have Covid-19 after they have had a positive antigen rapid test result.
Madam Ho said: “These are extraordinary times, and sending an ART+ staff to a GP clinic to get an MC is just causing one more point of infection transmission”.
For human resource records, she said in her post on Wednesday, they can ask employees to do their own ART tests based on an honour system, have a supervised ART test via a video call, or have the employee go to a quick test centre to do a supervised self-test.
“Do NOT ask the employees to go to GPs, polyclinics or the hospital A&Es for additional tests – this brings more infectious nodes into places with many other potentially highly vulnerable people seeking serious medical attention,” she said.
She said it was “unconscionable and irresponsible” to ask those who have tested positive to put themselves in contact with other patients, and requiring these employees to get MCs may put them in contact with others “who are sick, frail, and more vulnerable than the general population bcos their immune system is likely to be down when they are sick, old or frail and needing medical attention”.
Now to see if the MC logjam eases and the human crush at hospitals and clinics eases. /TISG