“We feel so used. The government is not serious about helping us and it is only using us for the pandemic,” Hartal Doktor Kontrak spokesman Dr Mustapha Kamal told FMT.

“We will give them some time so they can negotiate but if they do not give us an answer, the strike will happen in December.”

Mustapha noted that contract doctors had no choice but to do something more “robust and severe” in order for the government to listen to them.

Under Budget 2022, the government announced that contracts for 10,000 trainee doctors would be extended by another two years.

Mustapha said this was not the long-term solution that the doctors had been hoping for.

In July, Hartal Doktor Kontrak gave the government 26 days to resolve issues over the contract system or face a nationwide walkout.

At the strike, which was held on July 26, contract doctors demanded a fair career path and the same benefits as medical officers in permanent positions.

Earlier on June 29, the Malaysian Medical Association revealed that only 789 out of 23,077 contract doctors had been given permanent positions in the country’s public healthcare system since 2016.