An excellent essay by a concerned doctor.
Some gems
“Selfless service’ does not require you to give up your soul and life.”
“Selfless service’
People only use that term when they want doctors to go the extra mile.
That selfless service tag stops when the time comes to pay the bill.
When it is time to beat up a doctor or insult the entire fraternity based on one doctor or sometimes, pure ignorance.
“ Why, you can run over innocent people sleeping on the pavement and still be called selfless, as long as you have money to donate in front of the media for a worthy cause, as I found out recently.”
“But I will never allow you to become a doctor in India. Because I did not raise my child for two decades just to watch her lose her sense of right and wrong, of humanity or worse, watch her die.
And I don’t mean just physically.”
“There is also an email sitting in my inbox asking me to sign and share a petition demanding that applications for licensed guns be fast tracked for doctors. I have read it and placed a ‘star’ across the mail. I do not intend to sign it because I don’t advocate guns as a rule… I see children cry everyday when I bring an intravenous cannula near their tiny arms. I do not wish to have them worry about the gun in the doctor’s pocket too. But I empathize with the sorrow of the doctors who made the petition. And I know one day, I too may find myself revisiting this petition should a calamity befall me. As its is, hospitals have started employing bouncers now.”
millions cannot access India’s overburdened hospitals and inadequate medical facilities, a crisis illustrated by the fact that India is short of nearly 500,000 doctors, based on the World Health Organization (WHO) norm of 1:1,000 population, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of government data.
With more than 740,000 active doctors at the end of 2014 -- a claimed doctor-patient population ratio of 1:1,674, worse than Vietnam, Algeria and Pakistan -- the shortage of doctors was one of the health-management failures cited by this report of a parliamentary committee on health and family welfare, which presented its findings to both houses of Parliament on March 8, 2016.
doctors cannot be produced overnight, and if we add 100 medical colleges every year for the next five years, only by the year 2029 will the country have adequate (sic) number of doctors,”
The shortage of doctors, the report said, is despite the increase in medical colleges, from 23 in 1947 to 398 at the end of 2014. India, the report noted, has more medical colleges than any country, and 49,930 admissions were available in 2014.
“In Odisha, a man slung his wife’s body over his shoulder and carried it 10km after being denied an ambulance on August 24, 2016.
In Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, a man’s sick son died on his shoulder after being denied admission to a Kanpur hospital on August 29, 2016.
“
Is this because there is a superstitious belief that a dead body carried in a public transport causes untouchability to all the travelers ?
Which hospital provides an ambulance to carry a dead body from their facility to the patient’s home ,without any payment ?
