Brutality on Doctors : An Analysis

What happened at NRSMC didn’t begin at NRSMC. It didn’t even begin at Kolkata. The brutality that the hospital staff faced on duty on 10th June starts at the failure of the Indian government to implement rigid family planning and to protect India’s borders from infiltrators. Infiltrators flock in huge numbers from adjoining Bangladesh to all parts of India. They are mostly uneducated and are provided with almost all benefits that a Citizen of India receives and in return, they vote for the communist parties, helping them stay in power. These are the people who decided it was fair to attack a hospital to avenge the death of an old, dying man.

Coming to the former, India now has exactly ½ health personnel per thousand. This is nowhere enough. Every doctor is human; it is only fair that the accomplished doctors work for fixed hours and encash lakhs per month. With the hard work they put; they deserve it. Problems arise when people take their frustration with a fixed-hours doctor, out on a junior who, perhaps is the most wretched creature at that time. The junior cleans up the senior’s mess, stays awake for days in a row to take care of the hours that are not included in the schedule of the senior, manages studies and exams at the same time and earns virtually nothing.

Let’s focus on the number 1/2. Who are we kidding? It is next to impossible for one doctor to manage 2000 people at once. Negligence is bound to take place. And it does. The stories of indifference faced by the poor, of private hospitals milking their patients, of women being abused and harassed, their screams of pain neglected, are too many to keep aside. India doesn’t have a culture of suing a doctor for negligence. Where do the sufferers go? How long do they keep mum? Who pays the lengthy bills? The answer is NRSMC. The answer is RIMS at Ranchi. The answer is every one of the clinics and hospitals that has faced violence.

Was the doctor’s protest justified? You ask. It was. It was because they protested in peace without shirking their duty. They kept attending to emergency services when their hostels were being vandalized. No one can blame them. Was the government’s response at Kolkata justified, you ask? Let us not forget that even the Supreme Court brutally squashed our petition for providing Airport-like security to doctors. “We cannot provide safety at the cost of the patients,” they said. Ms. Banerjee may have been wrong in delaying talks (while waiting for BJP and RSS to join the agitation so she could safely transfer the blame on them), but SC is right. Deploying security personnel is not the solution. Making well-equipped healthcare facilities, improving the doctor/patient ratio, removing hurdles from the path of a student of medicine, is. This problem will continue in a nation where there aren’t enough doctors to provide quality care or let’s say, where there are too many people to provide equal treatment to all.

There is only one way of handling a situation like this- rigorous implementation of Ayshmann Bharat Scheme and extending its benefits up to the lower middle class. When financial concerns are eliminated, the receiver will not look at the giver with suspicion in his eyes. When the hospitals find their bills paid, they will not have any excuse for mismanagement. When the doctor is not restricted by bonds and morality, only then does he performs his best.