Strategic move: Striking doctors set up roadside OPDs

Doctors who refused to work at hospital outpatients department at the call of YDA set up roadside camps on Monday.

LAHORE:

Doctors who have refused to work at outpatients department of teaching hospital at the call of Young Doctor’s Association Punjab (YDA) set up roadside camps on Monday.

YDA leader Dr Hamid Butt said that the decision to set up the camps was taken after the government took a disappointing position at a meeting between the committee, constituted by the chief minister to discuss the YDA demands, and the YDA representatives on Sunday.

More than 30 doctors from each of the six teaching hospitals in the city have set up roadside outpatient department (OPD) where patients lined up on sidewalks for medical assistance. Dr Iqbal Kazmi, the former Lahore General Hospital (LGH) medical superintendent, said that normally the OPD also has around 30 to 40 doctors to treat the patients.

At the LGH, roadside OPD included doctors from medicine, surgery, orthopedic, neurosurgery and dermatology wards.

YDA leaders said they have chalked out plans for gradual escalation of the strike, if the Punjab government did not take steps to raise their salaries. LGH’s Dr Nadeemur Rasool said that they were seeing the patients because they had been accused of being selfish and ignoring the patients.

“Here we are, on the roadside for the people who need us,” he said.

LGH’s YDA member Dr Irshad Hussain said that the roadside OPD centres were symbolic of the health care sector’s situation in the province.

“In most hostels, doctors sleep on broken floors. They work round the clock for nominal wages. This amounts to forced labour,” he said.

Ijaz Hussain, one of the patients at the camp outside the LGH, said that the services at public hospitals were already poor. The protests and now the outdoor OPDs had made it even worse, he said.

“The doctors have a reason to protest. The current situation in the country is on account of the fact that the government does not care about the people,” he said.

Some patients said that the government was hurting the doctors directly and the people indirectly. Dr Rai Ahmed, YDA Punjab’s LGH unit president, claimed that no patients had been neglected since the protests started.  “We are not neglecting the patients. It’s just something our critics have invented to malign us.”  The OPDs, he claimed, have been a great success.

Media Cell

Later, Dr Butt told a press conference at the Services Hospital the association had set up a YDA Punjab Media Cell. Dr Butt said that the idea was to do ensure effective communication with the media. Besides standing up for the rights of the doctors, he said, the YDA provided research facilities and alerts about various healthcare issues. A press representative would be available at every hospital for coordination between the press and the association, he said. He said that the issue of the doctors’ salaries was very important and required more and more people to support the protests.

The association, he said, was trying to negotiate with the chief minister’s mediating committee, headed by Allama Iqbal Medical College principal, Javed Akram.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 8^th, 2011.