Wednesday, July 12, 2006

The Mass Murder of Patients

All India Institute of Medical Studies (AIIMS) is one of the premiere institutions of the world in field of medicine. The doctors passing out and the ones employed at AIIMS are considered best in the world, all because of the world-class infrastructure provided by government from the taxpayers’ money. The doctors are good academically and in dexterousness. But, they are not good professionally and ethically. In fact, it seems that all the doctors of AIIMS have forgotten the Hippocratic Oath they once took at the start of their career – or did they take it at all?
The doctors should be treating their patients with all the skills and infrastructure that has been provided to them by the government not only because they are under oath but also because they are serving the very people from whose taxes they get their salaries and from that public money only AIIMS was built through which they received their world-class education in the first place.
These doctors do not understand the agony of people who to travel as much as 3000 km or more in the hope of getting better treatment and then finding out that let alone the treatment they are not even being let-in in the hospital. There have been instances when patients have committed suicide in front of hospital (call it a very painful euthanasia) because they could not endure the hopeless wait in front of hospital while the doctors sat hardly 50 meters away from him happily drinking fruit juices under the banner of ‘Indefinite Strike of AIIMS Doctors’.
The negligence of duty of doctors is a cause of lesser worry when compared to the way media presents the news of strike. The death of patients comes to nothing when it comes it comes to strike by doctors, media glorifies the “cause” of doctors and presents the deaths as a natural part of such process.
The government must put interest of the public before everything else, the doctors may be on strike for a valid reason but it still does not give them right to not to serve their patients. Any more strike and government should immediately dismiss the striking doctors from service, not only that, they should also be blacklisted. The doctors must understand that with government paying lakhs of rupees to train a single doctor, they too have a certain responsibility towards the society and its people.