Responsibility

Later that week, we held the College membership examination.

I shall not elaborate on the running. Our secretaries and nurses are highly experienced, and things were always smooth under the organisation of RM. The only difference we had this time was, on the Saturday after the examination, the College asked us to organize a "training day" for those candidates who planned to sit for this examination in the next year or two.

CS, the representative from the College, came and visited us that morning and saw to the things.

After the program started, we had a leisured moment of casual chat.

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"You know, I'm slightly fed up with arranging this," he began.

"Oh...!" I put up an inviting smile.

"Alas, this program is entirely for the benefit of the candidates, and it's practically free - the small amount of application fee is almost always covered by their department training fund. However, few of them applied. We actually had to extend the deadline of the application and keep reminding department heads of every hospital to encourage their own trainees," the professor of rheumatology finished without a second breath.

"Time has changed," I murmured, "It's now not the responsibility of a trainee to learn, but a duty of us - consultants and the College - to teach. It's quite like teaching our own children: Unless we do away with our own sense of responsibility, they own take up theirs."