A lot has been said about the entrenched corruption, institutionalized unethical practices in medicine, involving prescription of unnecessary tests, surgeries, or un-necessary admission to hospitals, either for commissions or to meet the targets, forcefully imposed upon the doctors, by the hospitals. Apart from the damage caused by these obvious manifestations of corruption, there is an insidious damage slowly seeding into the field of medicine, by thwarting committed professionals who had internalized the Hippocratic Oath in letter and spirit, and sought to carry it out in practice.
Let me put forward my take on the condition of patients, doctors and infrastructure of the hospitals run by the Govt. of this nation. A patient urinating blood is brought in to one such hospital. About 7-8 beds lie vacant in the hospital room, yet the lady is made to lay upon a thin, stinking and dirty rag, on the floor. A junior doctor or a House Surgeon who manage some 6000 bucks of stipend monthly, visit the patient. He asks the nurse to get few injections and a catheter for the patient. Remember, these are basic supplies any hospital should be having, and every govt. claims to provide them free of cost.
After a heck of search, when the doctor is informed that one out of three injection is only available, and catheters are out of stock, since last 4 days, what good can a doctor do to the patient now? Many of you reading this, are sitting in the most aspired seats of the finest medical colleges of India, or have lately been posted to an ill maintained rural hospital. Some of you are consultants, reading this while taking a break between cases, and others are people like us, who are solely dependent on these professionals who are trained for almost a decade, to save lives. In the case I discussed above, the physician is left with two choices: either send the patient to a better equipped hospital, provided the patient is affluent enough to bear those expenses. OR. Wait till the equipments arrive, at the mercy of the officials in-charge, to start with the treatment, which is often too late to save the life of a patient.
CLIMAX:
The moment, one such patient dies because the hospital never had the basic life saving equipments, violence crops in and doctors become the punchbags of the angry, inconsolable mob outside the hospital gate, waiting to vent out. Beaten up, manhandled, threatened and even slapped are the students of the most deemed institutes of our nation, who work even without week-offs at a stretch for 80-90 hours. Have they chosen to be a part of this noble profession to earn this? Or, did suffering violence come under the ‘noble part of the profession’? Do you think these doctors are trained in self-defence and safeguarding themselves in a war-fare too?
Now do I have enough proof to draw some similarity between the Khans and the doctors of our nation? Haven’t we been equally intolerant to both? I chose to take a stand against this, because I could not wait for another patient to die or another doctor to be harassed.
Instead of complaining of brain drain, the govt. needs to invest more in the hospital infrastructure, availability of drugs, equipment and all of what is needed to facilitate treatment. Mostly, in govt. jobs posting to rural hospitals have been made compulsory. But it won’t do much good to the rural population unless the hospitals are well equipped. The population is as high 1.3 billion and it is a petition to the Govt. to spend more in keeping people of our ‘Swatch Bharath’ healthy. Poor people forming the bulk of the population need reliable medicines, surgery at affordable costs. How about the field of research in medicine, bio-medical engineering, biochemistry, pathology, genetics which have lied underrated for ages, in our country? Research forms the backbone of advancement in any field.
While the rest of the world already made huge progress in these areas, we were busy reading how cartoonists got arrested after ridiculing politicians, and trying to copy western ways of clothing and fooding.
There are passionate professionals willing to lend expertise, in different unreachable parts of our nation. We have made enough advancement in the networking and tele-communication domain. It would not be difficult to connect a medical officer sitting at a remote village hospital, who needs assistance from a specialist from the city. Imagine a physician posted in a rugged village of North Sikkim, consulting a Neurologist from Delhi, over an MRI report, he had problem diagnosing!
Also, it is time for doctors to take a stand and speak for yourselves. Be it from career progression point of view, or the entire treatment system, with deeper introspection, you know the crux of the problem better. Pull yourself out of the couch, and act now. Doctors, light… camera… rolling…. ACTION!
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