Long working hours, no leave, little sleep, unhygienic living conditions and the constant fear of getting beaten up by relatives of a patient esident doctors in the city are forced to put up with all this.
Long working hours, no leave, little sleep, unhygienic living conditions and the constant fear of getting beaten up by relatives of a patient — resident doctors in the city are forced to put up with all this and more for a monthly stipend of Rs15,000.
“Our counterparts in Delhi are getting a monthly stipend of Rs45,000 since October 2008. Even other states pay better stipends,” Dr Jeevan Rajput, the president of Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors (Mard), said.
The demand for an increase in the stipend amount is not new. Resident doctors went on a strike in 1999, demanding a raise in their stipends, which was Rs4,000 before 1999. In 2003, it was raised to Rs8,000 after another strike. And in 2006 the stipend was increased to Rs15,000 after another prolonged strike. “That was three years ago.
Everyone deserves a raise. Would you work year after year without receiving any hike in your salary?” Dr Santosh Aher, a resident doctor, asked. Salary is not the sole bone of contention though. A resident doctor working in a government hospital is on the call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Work starts at 7am, with collection of blood samples of patients, filling up forms and then doing the rounds of the wards. A resident doctor is expected to attend to all patients admitted in a ward. And there is no question of a break. “We tell our patients not to eat vada pav. But that is what we eat — some times at breakfast, lunch and even dinner,” Dr Sameer Ali, another resident doctor, said.
The doctors’ residential quarters are an unhygienic mess, with four to five doctors sharing a single 10X12 room with scarce water supply throughout the year. And then there is the eternal problem of having to deal with irate relatives of patients. “The CCTVs are not monitored, and the police are armed with nothing but a lathi,” Rajput said. As a surgeon in the emergency ward of KEM Hospital he has had to face the wrath of many an angry relative, the doctor said. “And yet our aim is not to inconvenience patients. That is why from Friday we started running parallel out patient departments in government hospitals across the state.”
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