Quote:
Originally Posted by Cogito Ergo Sum
Never in a doctors' strike has an emergency been closed. We close the OPDs which operate from 8-2, and anyone who has ever visited a hospital knows that serious patients present to the Emergency and not the OPD. In fact, during the days of strike, Emergency is overloaded because we treat even some of the OPD patients in it! And, in case you don't know: Emergencies operate 24/7. No Eids, Independence Days, 9,10th Muharram, and other such days when everyone else is chilling in their homes ever relieve the doctors of the emergency duties.
The number of deaths appearing on the media is misleading and I don't blame you or anyone else to develop negative opinions based on misinformation. Patients die in emergencies on a daily basis. On strike days, the media personnel obtain a record of the deaths on that particular day in the emergency and report it with a headline, "Doctors' strike claimed __ lives". For those who know how things work, this very notion of patients dying due to the closure of OPDs is absurd and laughable. A dying patient presents to the emergency, s/he has nothing to do with the OPD!
Lastly, I would like to address what Adil has said. Though I am in agreement with his argument of professionals in general being at a disadvantage in Pakistan as a whole, I am bothered by this tendency to compare engineers, pharmacists and other professionals with doctors. This is not because I have some superiority complex, I just find this comparison similar to comparing apples with oranges. Just as doctors don't know the work environment and nature of duties of the engineers and other professionals, non-doctors too don't have any idea about the hospital conditions. The level of competition to reach a medical college, the stress of going through a five-year long period of studying of the toughest stuff that there is, doing a house job where you work ~100 hours a week (12 hour per day average), being unable to stay off work even on public holidays, equally rigorous Post-graduate training etc; all of these things at least make us worthy of a status/privileges given to the civil servants on administrative posts. We are the ones doing "civil service" in true sense of the term. If we don't even get a proper service structure after all of this, then I am afraid this nation deserves the massive brain drain which is already in progress.
P. S.
Apologies to the thread starter for discussing something which is totally unrelated to the theme of the thread.
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Why strikes? Who has to suffer? Why to make suffer a common man every other day? Why to play with the health of others?
These strikes wreak havoc on the poor people of Pakistan. No, doubt these strikes are wicked notions. These tactics show, the doctors are trying to gain advantages due to the helplessness of others just to get their demands fulfilled and this is by no means ethical.
Generally employees are paid lesser in government jobs but that is not a case with doctors. Doctors already get a better pay when compared with the other government servants having similar duration of experience. Who gets paid more than Rs 55,000 at start in a government job except a doctor? If someone is not satisfied with government job then he must not rush towards government jobs but it is unjustifiable to tease impecunious people.
About duty hours i would say, many of the policemen have even worse duty hours but they get paid meagre salaries with many life threats. No doubt doctors work hard during their studies but that goes right with engineers, pharmacists, chartered accountants and many other professionals who get their degrees with their sedulous efforts. It is pertinent to mention here that huge sums of money are spent by the state on the education of doctors and they owe it to the state and to the poverty-stricken people of this land.
PS- better service structure is the right of every employee of the state.
PPS- Big appology to the starter of this thread for annihilating the soul of this thread. Sir, on the issue of doctors, i won't be commenting on this thread anymore.
