My Journey of becoming a TCM Physician Chap 16: The Return but only to be Deemed as Foreign Students
So we were all excited to finally go back to Singapore ‘for good’ and start to put whatever we have learnt to action! Or so we thought.
Well, as we had to have the license before we could start seeing patients, the bar set by the authority was such that it was in a way to ‘protect’ the local pool of physicians’ rice bowls, BY RIGHT.
By left, however, what came as the first disturbing pool of shit that dropped onto all of us was that we were deemed by the authority as foreign students because we came back from China, Beijing and our certifications were from a foreign institute and not a Singapore TCM institute. So the hurdle we had to cross was we had to satisfy a 400 hours of renaturation course (yes, it was literally called R-E-N-A-T-U-R-A-T-I-O-N course) to so-called get us into Singapore clinical setting mode. And for this 400 hours renaturation, we were suppose to find a certain clinical title and I-forget-how-many-years-of-experience physician to tag to ourselves to and just sit in with them during clinicals, the so-called mentorship. And we were supposed to pay the physicians through our own pockets for the hours that we tagged to them. And for 400 hours, by the calculation of the time we satisfy this criteria, we would have to wait one more year before the next yearly licensing exam. Which meant we would have to look for odd jobs or simply jobless while waiting for the next round of exam. *whoever is alive and faced with such situation should feel like banging head against wall*
My STRE license exam notes are still in my cabinet!!
In the end, help came because we appealed as quite a big group (about 60 of us) that we were still under the local varsity and that our programme was just a combined venture (so corporate, don’t you realise too?) of the local and foreign varsity. In the end, our hours got much reduced so that we could satisfy this criteria just in time before the exam. But trust me, this totally also caused all of us had lesser time on our own to study and memorise for the exam because we had to shuffle to and fro to clinics daily to just ‘sit in’ and watch. And I’ll introduce you to the load of our license exam in my next blog that we had to work with in the constraint of time, brain and energy because of such ‘surprised’ hurdle created for us.
Think this is tough enough? Follow me on my journey before you make that conclusion.