Doctors’
agitation
The dust had not
yet settled on the doctors’ strike in public hospitals in Punjab when an
unfortunate incident occurred in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that has resulted
in a doctors’ strike breaking out in KP too. First, the latter incident. Khyber
Teaching Hospital (KTH) Peshawar’s Assistant Professor Dr Ziauddin Afridi had
some service issues that he wished to discuss with Professor Dr Nausherwan
Burki, who unfortunately did not accommodate his request. Dr Afridi then took
the unusual step of procuring some eggs, bursting into the conference room of
KTH where Dr Burki was chairing a meeting, and proceeded to ‘crown’ the latter
with ‘egg on his face’. Dr Afridi next encountered KP Health Minister Hisham
Inamullah Khan in the corridor and, allegedly after an exchange of hot words
with the minister, was soundly thrashed by the minister’s guards. The KP
doctors have since gone on strike and demanded an FIR be registered against the
minister, pending which the strike will continue. The minister has threatened
the striking doctors with ‘action’ unless they return to work. As it is, the
doctors’ strike in Punjab, spearheaded by the Young Doctors Association (YDA),
has been ongoing for about two weeks. While patients (mostly poor, some having
travelled to city hospitals from great distances and small towns or rural areas
where healthcare is inadequate) are inconvenienced and perhaps the critically
ill run risks to life and limb because of such strikes, it must be noted that
media coverage by and large focuses on public inconvenience in such situations
without bothering to get to the bottom of the matter by reflecting the striking
doctors’ viewpoint. Practitioners of the medical profession, young or old, are
not likely candidates for being dubbed ‘irresponsible’. Given our public
hospitals’ inadequate and crowded facilities, doctors who work long hours and
sometimes round the clock are to be appreciated and dealt with differently from
the way the KP health minister wishes to, or earlier Punjab Health Minister
Yasmin Rashid threatened to. The latter has gone a step or two even beyond her
KP colleague and asked the intelligence agencies to prepare lists of young
doctors who are responsible for the agitation, while rounding on senior doctors
of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the top professional body of the
medical sector, for ‘instigating’ the young doctors’ agitation and strike.
And now to get
to the bottom of this issue. What is the beef of the Punjab YDA? It is the
attempt by the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government to impose the Medical
Teaching Institutions (MTI) Act 2015 of KP in Punjab too, preparatory to
extending it to the rest of the country and reforming the structure, rules and
management of the MTIs throughout the country in a uniform manner. The rub is
in the detail that the MTI Act offers contractual service only to doctors, a
measure seen by the Punjab YDA as a step in the direction of the privatisation
of public hospitals, which they believe will make medical care unaffordable by
the vast majority of poor people who throng such institutions. Now the Punjab
YDA has been joined by the KP striking doctors in their stated opposition to
the MTI Act. Reports say Dr Nausherwan Burki, a cousin of Prime Minister Imran
Khan, was the architect of the KP MTI Act 2015, which has reportedly not to
date been properly implemented even in KP. Two things are inexplicable in this
whole fracas. One, why are the PTI provincial governments oblivious (despite
having a seasoned professional as health minister in Punjab) to the difficult
conditions in which doctors work day and night in the public hospitals? Why are
they unwilling to talk to and consult the very doctors who are crucial to the
running, let alone reform, of the public hospitals? Do they believe they can
railroad what is proving to be unacceptable legislation through over the
objections of the doctors and still come out with an improved functioning
public health sector? Surely the path to take, sans threats and warnings of
dire action, is to sit down with the agitating doctors in Punjab and KP and
thrash out their differences in a civilised manner. Any other course,
particularly harshness, may not achieve the goals the PTI has set itself and
may end up causing a further deterioration, if not collapse, of the public
healthcare sector. Surely no one wants that.
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