Unworthy doctors

On Tuesday, the doctors at the San Fernando General Hospital (SFGH) walked off the wards, leaving the ill to fend as best as they could with the help of nurses and a few senior doctors. We use the term “senior” here in its sense of doctors of the old school, who understand that the practice of medicine carries with it a moral commitment in which the care of the patient is paramount.

The South doctors were protesting attacks made against them in recent times. The most recent one occurred on Monday, when Dr Dexter Furlonge was attacked in the SFGH’s car park. But the doctors returned to work that same evening, after a hastily arranged meeting with Health Minister John Rahael, who promised to come up with a formal security plan for all SWRHA institutions.

But, if this issue could have been resolved so quickly, was it necessary for the doctors to put their patients through the stress and trauma of not having doctors attend to them for an entire evening? We realise it is possible that the doctors had been pleading for a meeting with the Health Minister for a long time and he had ignored their concerns. But this seems unlikely, given the kind of action-oriented minister Mr Raphael has shown himself to be. In any case, it seems that the doctors could have tried other means of getting their issue heard before taking the extreme action of leaving sick people unattended.

Certainly, doctors need to have proper security, especially since many of them have to work late shifts. The Medical Association in a statement asserted that “Statistics have proven that 60 percent of our doctors have been verbally abused or physically assaulted in recent times.” It is interesting to discover that the Association keeps statistics on such matters, but we would have preferred more exact terminology.

After all, if the organisation that oversees doctors has statistics of this kind, they could have let the public know if it is that six out of ten doctors have been assaulted in the past three months or three years; and how many of these assaults were verbal or physical; and whether verbal assault means a loud cuss-out or a patient complaining about a lack of attendance after a five-hour wait.

We would also appreciate the statistics as to how many patients they treat and how many are mistreated or die because the doctors have refused to go to work. We are totally fed up with these people who call themselves doctors but who, at the drop of a hat, walk off the job. They are unworthy of the profession.

In addition, we wonder why doctors under the SWRHA seem especially prone to complaint and strike action? Is it that the SWRHA is less competent than the other RHAs?

Again, this seems unlikely, especially given the revelations about the North Central RHA. Or is it that the SFGH management and layout makes that institution more difficult to run, so that doctors who work there have worse working conditions than doctors in any other part of the country?

We do not have the answers to these questions, and the SWRHA doctors certainly made little effort to clarify their complaints before walking off the job.

In so doing, they have exacerbated the image that the general public already has about them: that the majority of doctors in the South shockingly put themselves and their agendas far in front the care of the sick.