Doctors’ Protests Are Fine, But We Need To Regain Patients’ Trust

A junior resident at AIIMS hospital pens her thoughts on the nationwide protests & how it could have been handled.

India recently witnessed multiple nationwide protests by doctors and medical staff, in the wake of the fracas at NRS Medical College & Hospital in Kolkata on 10 June.

Now that the din has died down, and the doctors have resumed their duties, the members of the medical fraternity must introspect and evaluate the causes, gains, losses, and the way forward, so that such situations can be avoided in the future.

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Why The Patient-Doctor Relationship Has Hit Rock-Bottom

First, let’s look into the overt reality of the hospital-patient dynamic. The doctor-patient relationship has hit rock-bottom. Harassment and physical assaults on doctors have become increasingly frequent, with over 75 percent of doctors having faced violence at work. There is effectively no security for doctors, and teaching us martial arts for self-defence is apparently the administration's “solution”.

Patients and their families have grown increasingly distrustful — “Doctors are money-making machines without compassion”, “their negligence and lack of competence alone results in patients’ deaths” — are some of the common rants, especially by the educated classes.

Here are the primary contributing factors to this dire situation:

1. Abysmal healthcare worker to patient ratio (one government allopathic doctor per 10,189 people, 10 times lower than the WHO’s recommended ratio of 1:1000)
2. Inadequate infrastructure, and the lack of spending in public health – especially in peripheral hospitals and health centres (1.02 percent of GDP spent on healthcare, Rs 3 per day per person)
3. Systematic destruction of the public healthcare system to promote the corporatisation of healthcare
4. The resultant (steep) increase in healthcare expenditure, especially for the lower middle-class (67 percent out of pocket expenditure)
5. Corruption at every level of bureaucracy

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What We Gained & Lost During the Doctors’ Strike

In the ledger of gains, we have some verbal assurances about our security, and a fresh conversation for a stricter law to tackle violence against doctors. Although, there are laws which can be invoked for the physical assault of doctors and healthcare staff on duty, or mobbing and trespassing in hospitals, their implementation is still a far cry. We have also shown the people and the government that we are not the soft targets we are thought to be.

In my opinion, above all, we have realised and proved that we can leave our personal agenda behind to unite for a common cause. This has hugely increased our confidence as a fraternity.

However, we must not forget about, or turn a blind eye to, what we lost. Our week-long protest became the cause of much irreversible damage.

Countless people suffered, and some of them lost their lives as a direct or indirect consequence. Any doctor who has failed to save a life knows how painful the feeling is, and thinking of the lives that could have been saved if not for the strike, is bound to fill our hearts with guilt and pain.

While emergency services were running for the better part of the strike, we cannot deny the fact that chaos and confusion resulting from the strike caused irreversible delay in patient care. People suffered — both physically and in the monetary sense.

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We, ‘Intelligent Doctors’, Forgot That Hate Begets Hate

As doctors, we often fail to give due regard to the patients’ and their families’ suffering. The apparent lack of empathy and tactfulness causes huge distress for the suffering family. Such situations can create a lingering animosity against doctors or medical staff. Not addressing this animosity has also led to the current eviscerated hospital-patient dynamic, the brunt of which was borne by the young junior doctors in a traumatic manner.

Another overlooked, but important loss was that of the protesters succumbing to the hatred propagated by divisive elements.

“More intelligent than the common lot,” as we like to think of ourselves, we should have been wiser and remembered that “hate begets nothing but more hate.”

What now?

The gains, it seems, are not going to sustain in the long term. The losses, on the other hand, are deep-rooted and have an impact that is much more far-reaching. We have a burden on our conscience, blood on our hands. Despite the gains, we cannot choose a similar course of action every time an untoward incident happens. However, it can be argued, that we have been at the receiving end of assaults for far too long while being made into scapegoats for the government’s and administration’s failures. So, what other option did we have, but to retaliate?

Could Us Doctors Have Protested In Better Ways?

But we did have other options that were and still are difficult to realise, but much more constructive. If we claim to be better than the ‘rest’, isn’t it our moral responsibility to explore better ways to protest or retaliate? Let’s be more organised and united by quashing the petty differences of ‘senior-junior’, ‘private-public’, ‘consultant-resident’, ‘reserved-unreserved’, to become a significant force that can pressurise governments and their machinery to act, without holding poor patients at ransom.

We must compel the authorities to pay heed to the limitations of the current healthcare system, and revive the moribund patient-doctor relationship.

Simultaneously, the need to create an empathetic and competent future workforce in the medical field must be given priority. The addition of advanced communication skills training to handle extreme situations at the OPD and emergency to the curriculum of medical studies, could be a start. To reset the current tense dynamic, it’s imperative that we stay connected to the ground realities and societal issues, even the ones that do not directly involve our profession.

‘Sympathise With Others Before You Expect Them To Sympathise With You’

If we expect others to understand our issues, we need to actively associate ourselves with their plight. No matter how many emotional posts we share on social media about our hardships, it is simply irrational to expect others to sympathise with us for a choice we made.

They will only hear about the money we make and our vacations being ‘paid for’ by pharmaceutical companies. So let’s ask our conscience if we really are the ‘good’ people we think we are, and mend our ways accordingly. Let’s be committed to our profession, professional brethren, and the society at large.

The sense of security that such assimilation with the society will provide, will be incomparable. Our society as a whole needs to improve, and it’s impossible for us to do that single-handedly. We can only take up our roles and commit to them.

(Dr Shayeri Roy is a trainee ophthalmologist, currently working as a junior resident at AIIMS, New Delhi. When not working, her passions include reading, trying out new food, and short-distance trekking. She tweets at @newrinka1. This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses, nor is responsible for them.)