Doctors boycott OPDs toprevent arrest of colleague

Hundreds of patients faced difficulties on Tuesday after a handful of young doctors of Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) forcibly closed the OPDs and some other departments of the hospital in protest against the registration of an FIR against a colleague who had allegedly assaulted a patient in the emergency department a few days ago.

The Saddar police registered a case against Dr Usman over charges of torturing a patient after he complained of delay in treatment, officials said and added that when police went to the hospital to arrest the doctor, his colleagues misbehaved and created hurdles in his arrest.

Following the police action, young doctors called a strike and exerted pressure on the hospital administration to use its influence to get the FIR withdrawn. “Today, a handful of doctors forcibly closed the OPDs and some other departments of the JPMC in order to prevent the arrest of their colleague, Dr Usman, who is wanted to police for brutally torturing a patient,” a senior JPMC official said, adding that doctors had no right to take the law into their hands and subject patients to violence and torture.

JPMC Executive Director Dr Seemin Jamali said that unfortunately a doctor at the emergency department assaulted a patient when he complained to a senior doctor that Dr Usman was not seeing him and was asking him to visit the OPD next day. She added that it was an individual act of a doctor which caused defamation for the entire hospital.

“Like worship places, hospitals have their own sanctity and it should not be violated by the doctors themselves. The patient subjected to violence by the doctor lodged an FIR and police wanted to interrogate the doctor, but his colleagues portrayed it as a rights issue and boycotted OPDs, which amounts to blackmailing the administration.”

Dr Jamali said a video of the incident clearly indicated that the doctor assaulted the patient when he was seeking medical advice from a senior doctor. She added that instead of taking the law into their hands, the doctors should have made a complaint to the hospital administration.

“Today these handful boys and girls boycotted the OPDs and caused trouble for the patients. Most of them [the patients] are poor and cannot afford treatment at private hospitals and clinics. This attitude cannot be tolerated and administration would not bow before the illegal demands of the few trainee doctors.”

On the other hand, the Young Doctors Association (YDA) said its members boycotted the OPDs after the registration of an FIR against their colleague, and demanded that the FIR should be withdrawn or they would not let the hospital function in the coming days.

“If our demands are not met, we would boycott emergency and other departments and completely shut down the hospital,” YDA Sindh President Dr Samiullah Gill said. The Sindh health department took the boycott of the OPDs very seriously and warned that all the doctors involved in the illegal act would be taken to task. “Jobs and trainings of such doctors would be cancelled and they would be blacklisted by the department if they took the law and order into their hands and caused problems for poor patients,” said a spokesman for the health department.