Frontline healthcare workers : Bearing the brunt of the pandemic

With the rising number of Covid-19 cases across Pakistan, frontline healthcare workers are becoming more and more vulnerable to the potentially deadly virus. To ensure the safety of healthcare staffers, hospital administrations introduced strict protocols to contain the spread of the virus within their premises.

To that end, the rule of allowing only one attendant per coronavirus positive patient was imposed in all healthcare facilities. Yet, following their ‘tradition,’ several people from each family are still visiting their patients, paying no heed to the highly contagious nature of the disease.

Doctors say that overcrowding health facilities is causing different problems, including the unnecessary occupation of space and violation of social distancing. “Unfortunately, it is a tradition in Pakistan that each patient is accompanied by more than two attendants and the practice has been causing a shortage of space,” Young Doctors Association (YDA)’s patron-in-chief Dr Alamgir Yousafzai said. “Besides, if more people gather in hospitals unnecessarily, it can increase the spread of the virus to healthy individuals and other patients.”

According to Yousafzai, the government holds news conferences every day, informing the public that everything is under control, but ground realities are different.

“At present, Section 144 – a law that empowers district administration to issue orders in the public interest that may place a ban on an activity for a specific period – has been in place across emergency sections of all hospitals. Nonetheless, patients’ relatives resort to violence and beat doctors, nurses, and paramedics if they are stopped from entering the red zones of hospitals.”

Speaking to The Express Tribune, several doctors opined that the government made a “big mistake” by giving space to Covid-19 patients at every health facility in the province, adding that there should have been one facility in each district so that patients could be properly isolated.

“Last night, I visited the High Dependency Unit (HDU) -- a critically sensitive area of the hospital -- and was shocked to see at least two attendants with each coronavirus patient. Now tell me, how can you stop this virus from spreading further when you have healthy people sitting next to Covid-19 patients?” Yousafzai questioned.

He added that hospital staff cannot dare to ask the attendants to leave the HDU because they immediately resort to violence and start verbally and physically assaulting the staff. Such is the plight of healthcare professionals in our country.”

As of now, more than 540 healthcare workers have been tested positive for Covid-19 across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), out of which 12 people have succumbed to the disease. Despite having incurred so much loss and risking their own lives to save people, the healthcare professionals community is still under attack. Around 24 incidents of physical attacks on healthcare workers have been reported in the recent past.

“Doctors and hospital staffs are being physically assaulted but the parliamentarians seem to be least bothered! There is no legislation to protect healthcare workers,” the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Provincial Doctors Association (PDA) president Dr Amir Taj lamented.

Taj said that for the past seven years, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government has been promising to introduce legislation in this regard, but nothing has been done so far. He also stated that the doctors’ community tolerated a few incidents and remained silent for the sake of the patients who were already battling with Covid-19 but the attitude cannot be accepted if it becomes a norm.

“They [people behind attacks] know they are being supported by politicians, otherwise, passing a law to protect doctors is not a big deal. We will continue our struggle and will always raise our voice for the protection of our community,” Taj concluded.