An estimated 3,000 major and minor elective surgeries were postponed in Mumbai on Monday due to the nationwide doctors’ strike in protest of the recent assault on doctors in West Bengal.
Most private Out Patient Departments (OPDs) remained shut, but emergency, casualty and in-patient services functioned across the city. Public hospitals also remained fully functional.
A resident doctor at KEM Hospital in Lower Parel administers polio drops to a child on Monday. | Photo Credit: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury
“We have received unprecedented support this time and many top corporate hospitals too joined in,” said Dr. Lalit Kapoor, a senior member of the Association of Medical Consultants (AMC), a body of 11,600 doctors from Maharashtra and Karnataka. “We want the law to become stringent so that such incidents are not repeated,” he said.
Mumbai’s top private hospitals like Lilavati, Asian Heart Institute, Jupiter and Fortis, and charitable hospitals like Holy Spirit also supported the strike. “We were fully operational for emergency and in-patient services,” said Sister Sneha, executive director of Holy Spirit Hospital in Andheri. But OPDs, where the hospital gets nearly 600 patients, remained shut. “The hospital deferred 10 elective surgeries,” she said.
All OPDs at Bandra’s Lilavati Hospital, which tends to nearly 1,000 patients, remained shut too. “We did not postpone any surgeries as they would have overlapped with the procedures planned for the next day,” Ajaykumar Pande, vice president of the hospital, said. “Many patients come to the OPDs from outside Mumbai. They were inconvenienced, but we had to be in solidarity with our medical staff,” he said.
Patients struggle at the Thane Civil Hospital on Monday. | Photo Credit: Vibhav Birwatkar
The protesting doctors are demanding Central legislation for protection against violence. “If doctors become paranoid thinking that every other patient or relative may assault them, they cannot function with a calm mind. The self-respect of a doctor is thrashed with that one slap. How can the doctor gather himself up to work again?” Dr. Suhas Pingle, honorary secretary of Indian Medical Association, Maharashtra, asked.
“The government has to prioritise the security of doctors,” he said.
Dr. Mukesh Gupta, president of AMC, said there are always three victims who suffer in such assaults: the doctor, the other health care workers and all patients admitted to the hospital.