No sympathy for interns on strike

Students asked to get back to class

MUMBAI: Maharashtra’s interns and MBBS students who are on strike are not getting any sympathy from the state authorities, who have decided to come down heavily on the indefinite strike. The deans of almost all medical colleges have issued notices to students to get back to their classes. The strike entered its third day today.

“Students who are protesting are being marked absent,” said Basavraj Kadalage, spokesman for Maharashtra State Medical Students Association (MSMSA). This was confirmed by the joint director of the Directorate of Medical Education & Research (DMER) Dr Pravin Shingare. “If the interns do not report to duty, their stipends may be deducted.

Students who are protesting will be marked absent and may be barred from taking their upcoming exams” he said. More than 4,000 interns have stopped assisting resident doctors in hospitals, while 16,000 MBBS students have stopped attending regular lectures. They are protesting the union health ministry’s plan to increase the duration of MBBS course from five-and-a-half to six-and-a-half years so as to meet the demand for doctors in rural India.

Patient care in the bigger hospitals like KEM, Sion, Nair and JJ remained largely unaffected. Resident doctors, however, said that their work load had certainly gone up. “The interns assist us in the OPDs, collecting blood samples, etc,” said Dr Ravikant Singh of KEM Hospital. “So the overworked resident doctors are further stressed by the absence of interns,” he added.