Ignoring the Hippocratic Oath about patients, young doctors on strike again
If ever there was a valid reason for not going on an all-out walkout from work, it is on the occasion of the current Young Doctor’s strike. A raid by the Anti-Corruption Establishment’s (ACE) officials at Lahore’s Services Hospital to arrest an office bearer of Young Doctor’s Association (YDA) was successfully resisted by his violent colleagues, who also damaged official vehicles and closed down the Emergency Ward. Their grouse was that the Medical Superintendant and Principal were not informed beforehand, who would then issue notices to the accused to appear before the ACE. The doctor at the fray’s centre has absconded, but the YDA strike has spread like a virus to government hospitals across the Punjab. And the unfortunate patients who frequent these poor relations of the swank private clinics are again left in the lurch, as are questions of ethics, plain humanity and professional commitment. Young doctors have in the past fought for cheaper medicines for poor patients and ‘one patient, one bed’, a noble cause, but this present strike is purely a self-serving, self-interested and wholly inconsiderate affair.
Distraught humanity is being turned back from the abodes of healing and mercy. Soon there will be tragic tales of needless deaths, of ailing people left to fend for themselves. Unfortunately, the young doctors, like another highly educated class, the lawyers, often act like gladiators, resorting to fisticuffs and harassment against protesting patients, senior colleagues and subordinate staff alike. And the clueless Punjab government, which seemingly retains a provincial monopoly on doctors’ strikes, is without a contingency plan for treatment of the seriously ill. The distressed patients lament, ‘sometimes no medicines, sometimes no doctors’, and rightly blame the rulers who themselves travel abroad for treatment. The government and medical associations must swiftly resolve the impasse, and the protesting doctors too should reflect dispassionately on the helpless misery of and potential harm to suffering patients. Genuine protests must be time- oriented, for part of a day only, as securing patient safety and well being are paramount.
