State-run medical services across India have been severely disrupted due to protests by doctors demanding secure working conditions after the rape and murder of a trainee medic in the eastern city of Kolkata.
Tens of thousands of government-run hospital doctors took to the streets in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, and other cities including New Delhi, Mumbai, Jaipur, Agra and Hyderabad demanding justice for the 31-year old victim, improved safety measures and better in-house working conditions.
Dressed in white coats, doctors in Delhi brandished posters outside a large government hospita reading “Doctors are not punching bags.”
In a letter to federal health minister J P Nadda, the Indian Medical Association, the country’s largest doctors’ federation, said “inhuman workloads and violence in the workplace” were the reality in government hospitals.
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Kolkata police said the unnamed intern doctor killed in last week’s attack, whose badly mutilated body was found outside a seminar hall in the city’s 138-year old state-run R G Kar Medical College, had been raped after she retired there to sleep following an exhausting day’s work.
Police arrested a hospital volunteer with a criminal past, citing CCTV evidence, but the medical fraternity accused the West Bengal state government of a “cover up”.
Violent protests by doctors erupted in Kolkata and soon after across India, alongside a social media campaign highlighting security risks faced by medics in government hospitals,. This, in turn, led to the Kolkata high court handing over the case to the federally controlled Central Bureau of Investigation.
The Kolkata incident has yet again underscored the harsh conditions under which government doctors – particularly trainees – function, often working 36 hours at a stretch, during which they deal with an unending stream of patients.
Afterwards, most doctors have no access to places of rest, forcing them to grab snatches of sleep either in hospital seminar and lecture halls or even in empty patients’ beds. Women comprise about 30 per cent of doctors in government hospitals and 80 per cent of nursing staff in India.
Doctors in these overcrowded hospitals say they are frequent victims of people’s fury, either patients’ relatives after a death, or patients themselves demanding immediate attention.
India has about 70,000- hospitals, of which 63 per cent are privately owned, and where treatment is extremely expensive compared to the state-run facilities, which are free.
“The expectation [by the authorities] is that doctors should work round the clock and endure abuse,” Dr Namrata Mitra, a Kolkata-based pathologist, told the BBC. Nothing would change, she added.
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