Medical screening for all trainees at camps

KUALA LUMPUR: All national service trainees for the next intake will have to undergo medical screening after they report for training.

The 140,000 trainees due to attend training will be screened by one of the seven medical officers at each camp.

The screening will be done in the first two weeks of the programme.

National Service Training Department director-general Datuk Abdul Hadi Awang Kechil said this would be the standard operating procedure for future intakes to prevent any medical mishaps among trainees.

“Some teenagers will not declare that they have any problem when they report for training. So, we have to examine them,” he said in an interview.

He said if a trainee was deemed unfit for training and required further treatment, the medical officer on duty would defer his training. It, however, would not be cancelled outright.

“This means, they would still need to attend training after recovering from any medical condition they had,” he said.

According to the National Service Training Act, each trainee is obliged to attend NS training up to the age of 35.

Abdul Hadi said there would be five Health Ministry medical officers and two health department medical officers on standby at each of the 87 camps.

Every camp trainer has also received comprehensive first aid training by the Malaysian Red Crescent Society.

The next batch of 140,000 trainees will be the largest yet, an increase of 30,000 from this year. He said more than 900 volunteer trainees have applied so far.

To meet the number of the new intake, the department has altered its trainers roster to accommodate more than 5,500 trainers to achieve a ratio of one trainer for every 25 trainees.

“We called our temporary trainers and absorbed them as contract trainers. We were also open for applications.”

To ensure that trainers were prepared for the job, each new trainer was sent to a 20-day training-of-trainers course.

He said the safety and health condition of camps were checked by the Health Department, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and consultants appointed by the camp operators that are approved by the department.

Local health departments are also given a free hand to go into camps and decide whether to close or take action on errant camp operators or food handlers as they saw fit.

The first of three batch of next year’s NS trainees would be notified from Nov 17 through the media. They will report for training from Dec 27.