According to authorities and the media, hospital services were interrupted in a number of Indian cities on Tuesday as a nationwide doctors’ protest against the alleged rape and murder of a 31-year-old doctor in the eastern city of Kolkata spread.
Images on television showed thousands of medical professionals protesting the incident at a government-run hospital on Monday. They demanded improved security measures and justice for the victim, which shut down West Bengal state’s health system.
More than 8,000 government doctors in the western state of Maharashtra, which is home to Mumbai, the nation’s financial centre, joined the protest on Tuesday, causing it to spread across the country and stop work in all hospital departments save emergency services, according to media reports.
“Further Physicians’ protests against alleged rape and murder target Indian hospitals.”
Images from Reuters Television showed junior doctors in white coats in New Delhi, demanding an investigation as they sat in protest outside a large government hospital. The posters they held said, “Doctors are not punching bags.”Similar protests disrupted hospital services in several cities, including Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state, and Goa, a popular tourist destination in western India, leaving thousands of patients stranded, according to media reports.
The largest medical association in the nation, the Indian Medical Association, wrote to Health Minister J P Nadda, stating that “pedestrian working conditions, inhuman workloads, and violence in the workplace are the reality.”A request for comment was not immediately answered by a spokesman for the health ministry.
Even after the principal of the medical college where the doctor’s murder occurred resigned and a police volunteer in Kolkata was arrested over the weekend, doctors still believe their working environment is unsafe.
Reporters were informed by City Police Chief Vineet Kumar Goyal that a case had been filed against the suspect in accordance with rape and murder statutes.
Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, informed reporters that she had given state police until Sunday to finish their investigation, failing which she would turn it over to federal agencies.
According to state official N S Nigam, who spoke with Reuters on behalf of the government, emergency services were not provided on Tuesday in nearly all of the government-run medical college hospitals in Kolkata. The government was also evaluating the effect on health services.
In addition to being overworked and underpaid, doctors in India’s packed and frequently filthy government hospitals occasionally become the target of violent attacks from people enraged by the inadequate medical care they perceive.
Source: Reuters
