The Bengal Doctor's Strike! What REALLY happened
Junior doctors in West Bengal went on strike on June 11 after two of their colleagues were attacked allegedly by the relatives of a patient who died during the course of treatment at the NRS Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata. While walking down a corridor with a colleague at the NRS Hospital, Paribaha Mukherjee never expected a brutal attack coming, yet he suffered a fractured skull and needed a craniotomy. This was not the first time that a doctor had been attacked. A few years ago, a doctor in Dhule lost his eye. His only fault was that he asked the relatives to shift the patient to another hospital which had a CT machine and a neurosurgeon as it was not available in the civil hospital.
Neither Paribaha Mukherjee nor his colleague was involved in the treatment of the patient who died, but the outraged relatives set their sights on the first doctors that appeared in front of them and turned the hospital into a danger zone for the doctors. After learning about such a brutal assault on junior doctors in Kolkata, about 800,000 doctors across India went on strike demanding better protection and work conditions.
The doctors in Kolkata turned more furious after the chief minister, Mamata Bannerjee ordered them to end the strike and go back to work without giving their grievances the attention that it deserved. This enraged the doctors across the whole country. And soon the doctors all over the country joined the strike in support of the protesting Bengal doctors. From the RDA (Resident Doctor’s Association) of AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences) in Delhi to the hospitals in Assam, Bihar, and many other states decided to join this strike and paralyzed the health and medical services in the country.
“The events in Kolkata were just a flashpoint. This has gone on for too long. We have a right to security as ordinary citizens. This violence against doctors is not acceptable in any civilized society,” said Dr. Rajan Sharma, the president-elect of the Indian Medical Association (IMA). How can we expect doctors to work perfectly in such conditions where they are threatened for their lives? The doctors are either beaten up by the enraged family members or verbally assaulted. A survey conducted by IMA revealed that about 75% of doctors have complained of verbal abuse and 12% of physical violence. People are attacking the doctors that are only trained to save the lives of these very people.
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