Happy with ordinance, doctors withdraw protest

NAGPUR: Doctors and medical professionals attached to the Indian Medical Association (IMA) and its sister associations have called off both the symbolic protests they were about to observe for their long pending demand of central law to prohibit violence against doctors.
IMA had planned white alert protest on April 22 and a black day protest on April 23.The decision to withdraw protests came after the central government cleared the ordinance and made acts of violence against healthcare service personnel as cognizable, non-bailable offences.
“It’s a welcome decision by the central government and much needed at this point of time. Doctors are frontline soldiers against coronavirus. Unfortunately, they are facing violence by patients’ relatives in many places, even in Maharashtra,” said Dr Kush Jhunjhunwala, president of IMA Nagpur.
Going a step further, IMA has now asked the government to allow all hospitals to function regularly to ensure proper healthcare services to non-Covid patients.
“Hospitals and clinics across the country should continue to remain open and function during this lockdown period. Universal precautions including PPEs, social distancing and hand hygiene and other etiquettes will be followed. There is a need to upscale non-Covid services,” reads the statement issued by IMA national president Dr Rajan Sharma. Currently, only emergency and essential services are permissible in non-Covid hospitals.
“Apart from the emergency and essential services, we must start a separate category of ‘urgent’ services for cancer surgeries, organ transplants etc,” the statement further reads.
The medical association is also against the plans of local bodies to acquire private hospitals for Covid-19 quarantine centres.
“Practice of quarantining hospitals is a self-defeating exercise. Not only the services of the hospital concerned is lost to the community, the stigmatisation will leave it dead and defunct forever,” says the statement. Instead, the doctors’ organization has suggested some measures to tackle the Covid-19 challenge effectively.