The West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front held a long protest march Saturday to press on with their demand for justice for the victim of rape and murder at the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata. Their hunger strike has been on for over a fortnight despite the health of some of the participants being threatened by their fasting.
The issue of seeking justice for the victim may be justified, but the issue has lingered. It is time both parties, the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and the doctors, came off their high horses and started working sincerely towards finding a solution for the issue of safety of doctors.
A concrete plan for ensuring the safety of young medicos working long hours must be worked out and the Supreme Court itself has ordered this. A prerequisite for working out the details would be a normal atmosphere to prevail in the hospitals and among the medical practitioners who can then sit with the administration while a draft plan is drawn up for doctors’ safety.
Harping on a detail like the sacking of the West Bengal health secretary should be a very small thorn in the long road to safety, not only in that state but in hospitals and clinics around the country. Practising medical professionals may come under pressure from sexual predators as well as kin of patients who become violent in the unfortunate event of deaths of patients which may have had nothing to do with the quality of medical care being given.
The chief minister of West Bengal and her administration may have been wrong in trying to cover up the horrific incident that took place on the night of August 9 to rob the life of a young intern. But since the ordering of a CBI inquiry on top court intervention, the fixing of guilt may have been completed.
There may have been too much bad faith in the talks thus far. The time to move on and find ways to prevent the recurrence of acts against medical professionals has come and that can happen only if the doctors as well as the politicians stop this battle of egos and work together on solutions.
Not only the career of young doctors and medicos is imperilled by such delays in acting on serious issues but also the health of people who need medical care in hospitals.
