Pictures of plight

Braving the heat and dust for some three hundred kilometers from his village, Noorpur Thal in Khushab, the poor 64-year-old Haji Ghulam Rasool hoped that he would get some relief from the acute pain in his back at Lahore’s General Hospital on Monday noon. But his disappointment knew no bounds.
Ghulam Rasool suffers from a rare muscular disease in the back hurts constantly. “The pain is such that I cannot even sit for long,” he said, lying on the floor of the surgical outpatient department OPD at the LGH. He had nothing but curses for the doctors and the Punjab government.
One hundred and fifty doctors in the khaki, not used to treating ‘civilian’ patients are neither enough to man all positions left vacant by the striking doctors nor often even a temporary solution to the problem.
If anything illustrates the management failure of the Punjab government, not comprehending the scale of the crisis, this is it.
“I’ve spent Rs 2,000 as fare for myself and my attendant to reach the hospital and I will be set back by an identical sum on our way back. And what do I get here? The army doctor in the OPD did not have time to listen to me and understand what my ailment was. I’m a Haji, and they have no respect for me. On television they say the patients were being treated well. My family called, asking whether I got appropriate treatment, and I told them it’s all a sham. There is no relief here, there’s only police and army,” Ghulam Rasool said in a voice dripping with grief.
Unfortunately Ghulam Rasool is among thousands of poor patients coming from far and wide, from various districts of Punjab to public hospitals of this provincial metropolitan. And most of them not just continue to suffer, with not a hint of relief, and a pretty packet spent for no gain literally amounts to salt in the wound. Such pictures of plight can be seen in all the OPDs. The situation in other big-name public hospitals – Mayo, Sir Ganga Ram, the Services, Jinnah and Children’s – was no different.
“Normally there are around 10 doctors in this Orthopedic OPD, but today I’m the only one attending to patients. I’ve come here from the Social Security Hospital and have so far seen around 50 patients in the various OPDs that I was asked to visit. Things definitely are anything but normal,” said one doctor.
In Mayo Hospital, it was the same, just a handful of doctors in the Emergency, which the staff said had been shut down after the doctors were arrested Sunday night. Doctors from the army, the DG health office and the Social Security Hospital were drafted in were referring only those patients upstairs into surgery who were critical. For the rest, the answer was, come another time. A few seniors, one has to concede, were diligence personified, working overtime in the operation theatres.
By now this is quite obvious: in this battle of attrition between the young doctors and the government, it is the hapless poor patients whose suffering knows no bounds.
The medical superintendents of hospitals however said the hospitals have been functioning smoothly and patients treated per routine.
The CM’s advisor on Health Khwaja Salman Rafiq, however said the government is willing to accept the ‘just demands’ of doctors but they should call off the strike first. “They (the doctors) are playing with human lives, even the CM will sit and talk with them but the strike must be called off first,” he said.
That is a government call that has till now gone unheeded.