The prime minister is requested to take a sympathetic view of the plight of the young medical graduates
PESHAWAR: I am an MBBS doctor, having recently graduated from Kabir Medical College, Gandhara University, and currently doing my house job at Khyber Teaching Hospital, Peshawar. The duty of the house officer in the hospital is very tough but interesting. It is tough because he is on a 12 to 24-hour duty running the whole ward alone and can be called any time for extra on-call duty. It is interesting because a young medical graduate learns much more as a house officer than he has learnt in the past five academic years in a medical college.
The pity is that students who have graduated from private medical colleges are not paid stipends. They are kept in the lowly and uncertain rank of those who are “unpaid”. The government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) has doubled the pay of house officers who have graduated from public sector medical colleges while the graduates of private sector colleges have been cut to zero payment. The founder of Shaukat Khanum Hospitals is paying maximum attention to health and education in K-P. Surprisingly, his action of depriving graduates of private colleges to the insult of “unpaid house officers” is an unjust cruel joke with medical graduates of K-P.
The prime minister is requested to take a sympathetic view of the plight of the young medical graduates by awarding monthly stipends to them. It will help save them from humiliation and the print and electronic media should invite the attention of Imran Khan.
Dr Hamza Asad
Published in The Express Tribune, March 22nd, 2017.
Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.
