Doctors' strike

Nayak Hospital were hit on Wednesday after an estimated 1,500 resident doctors, interns and medical students along with 500-odd nursing staff went on an indefinite strike in protest against the dismal security situation at the hospital and the non-availability or substandard quality of essential items.

Patients were refused admission in the emergency ward, critical ones were moved out for tests and tempers ran high in the hospital throughout Wednesday with patients' relatives screaming outside the locked emergency building through the glass doors of which, the resident doctors and nurses who had assembled since morning looked on.

The scene was better in the wards where senior doctors had gone for usual rounds and many people in fact were oblivious about the trouble raging elsewhere in the hospital. Senior doctors in the hospital maintained that work in the OPDs had not been disrupted even though the news of strike spread, the turnout was lower than usual.

Additional medical superintendent Dr K D Mehta conceded that services have been affected "But not that much. Faculty members were working extra to compensate for the resident doctors' strike. Talks are on to resolve the crisis. The doctors and medical superintendent Dr Ramteke have gone to the principal secretary health."

The immediate provocation for the strike, resident doctors said, were two nearly simultaneous incidents on Tuesday night in which doctors on duty were threatened by patients' attendants. In the first incident, attendants reportedly threatened to "kill" a resident doctor in the medicine ward. "He was busy with a very serious cardiac patient when the other patient came in. He gave him some treatment but returned to the other patient which upset the attendants of second patient," said the hospital's resident doctors' association president, Dr Jitender.

In the second incident, doctors and nursing staff on duty in the surgery ward were threatened by four attendants of a Pakistani patient when they refused to hand over the patient's medical file. The staff members had reportedly called the security personnel but nobody turned up.

"This is a routine thing here. Security personnel are possibly bribed because there is a rule that only one attendant per patient is allowed but anything between four to ten people are present attending to each patient in the emergency. There is constant badmouthing and sometimes even manhandling of doctors. This cannot go on," said Dr Jitender.

Doctors and nurses also pointed out that in the new emergency block that was built very recently, there is no drinking water for anybody, there are no toilets on the ground floor and even for simple things like an X-ray or a CT scan, patients have to be taken all the way to the old emergency block.

"What good is an emergency where not even an x-ray can be done?" asked one striking doctor. Even as the hospital administration went into a huddle trying to negotiate with the irate staff members, Dr Jitender said: "We have had enough of the medical superintendent's assurances. We have even after all this, followed all procedures given a notice and then gone on strike. This time we will not take any assurances from anyone other than the principal secretary, health."