AIIMS resident doctors on strike after senior doc slaps colleague

New Delhi: About 1,700 resident doctors of All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) decided to go on indefinite strike on Thursday evening because, they said, their complaint against a high-profile eye doctor at the premier hospital for physically assaulting a junior doctor was not being taken seriously.

All services apart from emergency services have been hit due to the doctors’ strike. All routine surgeries have been cancelled.

The doctors on strike are demanding that Dr Atul Kumar, chief of Rajendra Prasad Centre (RPC) for Ophthalmic Sciences, be suspended pending an inquiry.

Dr Kumar allegedly slapped a senior resident doctor (name withheld on request) on Wednesday morning in front of patients and staff.

The resident doctor has, in his written complaint to the AIIMS director, said that Dr Kumar arrived early for rounds and got upset with the junior doctors for not being ready with patients’ documents.

“He got very angry and started shouting… My phone started ringing while he was scolding me so he tried to snatch my phone but I resisted. Then he slapped me, my spectacles fell off and I got blank for a minute (sic),” he has written.

The resident doctor left the eye centre and proceeded on previously sanctioned leave to his home in Nagpur. Dr Kumar, the resident doctor writes, apologised to him at least thrice saying he was “like my father”. Though he has accepted the apology, he has requested that he not be made to work with Dr Kumar.

Members of Resident Doctors' Association, AIIMS sit in protest as part of their indefinite strike. (Photo: ANI)

“He will unnecessary put charges against me. He is treating the biggest ministers of the country and anyone can do anything to me. I am not worried about me but more worried about my family (sic),” he has written in his complaint letter.

AIIMS has instituted a five-member committee to inquire into the incident, but the resident doctors, who began protesting outside the director Dr Randeep Guleria’s office on Thursday morning, are refusing to call off their strike.

The immediate trigger for their strike may be the well-regarded ophthalmologist slapping a junior doctor in public view, but as the three letters of complaints from doctors to Dr Randeep Guleria, AIIMS director, indicate, the anger is old and runs deep.

The letters — one by Resident Doctors Association, one by doctors of RAC, and one by the victim — list a litany of complaints against Dr Kumar.

They accuse him of routinely harassing and misbehaving with “female doctors”, including making “derogatory comments on their physical appearance”. Listing                     

other “innumerable instances of mental and psychological harassment”, they write of the regular threats he issues — to fail doctors in exams, to not issue experience certificates — and that he often does not allow residents to take leave, “including for their own wedding”, making senior residents to work without pay, “sometimes for as long as five months”.

Dr Kumar has also, they write, “blamed his own surgical failures on junior doctors”. Because of the “toxic, intimidating and negative environment” created by him, they write  that many RPC doctors have been admitted to the hospital’s psychiatry ward. In the last two months alone around 15 resident doctors have been under treatment for depression, the complaint states.

In their letters to Dr Guleria, they write that no one has dared to complain about him so far because he has “created an atmosphere of fear” and because he “constantly threatens and intimidates” junior doctors “with his powerful political contacts”.

Dr Atul Kumar, a Padma Shri awardee who counts among his patients Union finance minister Arun Jaitley and external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, presides over RPC, rated as one of the best eye hospitals in the country.

The 50-year-old RPC, which sees about 1,500 patients on a daily basis, is under the national programme for control of blindness. Apart from guiding policy related to blindness and eye health, the centre has conducted over 17,000 corneal transplant surgeries till date, of which 1,285 were done last year.

About 150 eye doctors at the centre report to him.  

The doctors told this newspaper that while the administration has agreed to an inquiry, it decided not to remove Dr Kumar from his post. “How will they conduct an inquiry if he is still the chief of RPC Centre? His termination is our main demand,” a resident doctor on strike said.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a doctor at the RPC said, “There is no doubt that he mistreats his subordinates and residents… My focus has always been to be in his blind spot… He doesn’t know you, he doesn’t see you. Tum apna kam karo aur ghar jao… Because he can be vindictive, he can target people… If he knows I am talking to you like this today, tomorrow if he’s in power, he may do something to harm me… Not physically, not this thing, but mentally he might torture me, academically…”

While one doctor spoke of having witnessed specific instances of sexual harassment at the RPC, other doctors said that they had “heard of these allegations”.