From Hippocrates to Moneypennys

From Hippocrates to Moneypennys
June 22, 2011   12:00:00 AM

Meenakshi Rao

Of the many shames frequenting the Indian democracy, more now than ever before, the one which claimed the lives of around 58 patients in Rajasthan and Delhi is the most heinous. Patients died due to a doctors’ strike in Government hospitals of Jodhpur where the medicos were demanding action against an earlier police lathicharge on them. Back in Delhi, Safdarjang Hospital came to a halt as doctors struck work in protest against the beating up of a colleague by angry relatives of a patient who died.

Even if one were to treat the great Hippocrates as a misnomer much like honesty has become nowadays, and grant the doctors their right to safety, nothing can justify the medical community’s growing callousness towards its own patients. The stories that came out of these hospitals were ghastly. A man in Safdarjang was close to violent insanity after his son was left unattended in OT after being administered anesthesia for a tricky operation. When he asked around what was happening and why the surgery had been abandoned on the operating table, he was told that just after the anesthesia was administered, the strike call had been issued and the surgeons and the anesthetist had left midway due to that!

Imagine carrying your son unconscious out of the OT with no one there to advise you how to bring him back to consciousness or knowing how dangerous it was for the poor child. The man was besides himself with worry. In the middle of uncontrollable sobs and carrying his son in his arms on to the street outside the hospital, he revealed how he had got the operation date after three months of an excruciating wait and how he did not know where to go and what to do next or even if his only son would survive this.

Well, this man was lucky. After all, his son was not dead, merely unconscious though one is still to know the fate of this sad case. In Rajasthan, 31 patients, many of them children, died despite being in the safest place possible — in a hospital. They were abandoned in ICUs, in operation theatres, on ventilators as also in OPDs and the casualty with no one — not the Government, not the doctors and not even their God coming to their rescue.

If this is not a shame what is? Which brings us to the ultimate question: Should the doctors be permitted to go on strike? And the paradoxical one: Should the Government bring the doctors to a situation where they have to turn into insensitive animals instead of committed professionals in a noble profession? The doctors will argue till their last breath saying they were forced into doing what they did and the Government would not have given them even a patient hearing had they not walked over the dead bodies of their patients!

Indeed, that’s callous and outrageous, not to mention, a blatant crime against humanity. Nowhere in the world are such gruesome strikes allowed which can kill patients en masse. Nowhere would anyone get away with such acts of omission. What happened over the last week, sadly however, does not sound impossible to our ears. Over time, doctors have grown insensitive, uncaring, commercial and profit-crazy beings. The commitment required for a profession, which is closely associated with giving and saving life, has become limited to only a few doctors. Rest have joined the race of making money any which way. And this includes ordering surgeries when they may not be required, pushing patients into testing every possible thing that may be unconnected with his condition and in some cases referring him to a hundred other doctors in his profit-sharing network!

All this, and the fact that doctors have resorted to striking work knowing well how many lives that would take, emanates from the lunacy in our healthcare policies which our Government has no intention of rectifying. Not just that, after 31 patients died in Jodhpur due to the strike, the Government has taken no action against the perpetrators of this mass murder except for granting them their demands and bringing them back to work. What about the accountability of the lives that have been lost in the process? Who will look into the fact that this should never be allowed to happen again? And, if the Government in the end had to concede the doctors’ demand, why wait for 31 persons to die before doing so? Why did the Ashok Gehlot Government not invoke the Essential Services Maintenance Act? Why did it not bring in doctors from other areas to save the dying patients while they haggled with the strikers? And last, why and how these doctors could get so insensitive and inhuman as to force their patients to die for a seemingly innocuous demand like an assurance of good behaviour by the police in the future?

We know that our Government doctors are overburdened and underpaid. Add to this, our private ones are bothered only about making money and being upwardly mobile. Between these two categories, it is the common man who dies, often unattended, and mostly because he could not find a committed doctor to save his kin.

Apparently, the Medical Council of India has strict guidelines for doctors, which say that patient welfare at all cost is the medical community’s undying and sole responsibility. Money, personal issues and things like strikes are only secondary. And apparently, violation of this guideline can attract scrapping of a doctor’s licence to practice. If Jodhpur was not a distinct case for such action against the striking doctors nothing ever will be. It is for the Government to become sensitive enough in treating the lives of its hapless voters with some amount of dignity. And for that, it needs to focus on healthcare, upgrade its norms, keep its medical community in good humour and, at the same time, see to it that doctors are not allowed to do what they did in Jodhpur and Safdarjang Hospitals.

One can still take in an unscrupulous doctor, like the one I encountered in a plush hospital the other day. He was wearing designer ware from top to bottom, looked like a done-up model and came in advising a complex kidney surgery for a stone when it was not really required. We declined politely but a day later I saw the same doctor running around with a harassed, confused patient filling in all the surgery forms for him in the admissions department and telling the clerk on the other side that his money should be packed in fast — before the patient changes his mind!

Even if one were to learn to live with such ones, there can be no explanation whatsoever for the ones who struck work and killed patients. One wonders what the opinion about the strike is within the medical community? 


Source: Sunday Pioneer, September 12, 2010