Doctors getting respect due to their critical role in fighting coronavirus

PESHAWAR: The doctors are getting attention and respect in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as the officials and people have started realizing their critical role in the frontline in the fight against coronavirus.

On Saturday, the police officials in Dera Ismail Khan presented a guard of honour to the doctors and other healthcare workers at the local public hospital to salute them for their work despite the risk of contracting the COVID-19. It was the first time that smartly turned out cops came to the hospital and presented the guard of honour to the medical fraternity.

This idea, which originated in Islamabad and was repeated in certain Punjab districts, has now caught on in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It is certain the cops in other districts of the province too would arrange guard of honour for the doctors, paramedics, nurses and medical technicians in the coming days. The police have become quite responsive to the complaints of the doctors. In Swat, the district police officer suspended two of his cops after they maltreated a senior physician, Dr Abdul Wasay, who is also president of Swat Doctors Association. They had stopped Dr Wasay when he was driving to Mingora to attend a meeting on coronavirus and taken him to the local police station. It sent a strong message to the policemen that doctors must be treated with the respect they deserve.

The young doctors are in the frontline of the struggle to contain and treat coronavirus patients. They have no choice but to remain present in the hospital during duty hours unlike their seniors, attend the outpatients department that sees a rush of patients and remain exposed to all kinds of infections. This was the reason that Dr Javeria Hayat Khan, who is working at a public hospital in Kohat, through the social media made an appeal to the secretary health, KP to close the OPDs temporarily to prevent the spread of coronavirus and focus attention on treating the patients affected by the virus. She explained how the doctors and other health staff were coping with the difficult situation prevailing in the public hospitals.