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| Doctors sit on a dharna in front of the head office of the Odisha branch of the Indian Medical Association in Bhubaneswar on Monday. Picture by Ashwinee Pati |
Bhubaneswar, June 25: A number of private clinics downed their shutters across Odisha today to observe a daylong strike to protest against the Centre’s move to “restrict” doctors’ autonomy.
However, services in government hospitals and major private hospitals were not affected by the strike called by the members of the state chapter of the Indian Medical Association (IMA).
About 100 clinics in the state capital remained closed in response to IMA’s strike call. The doctors sat on a dharna in front of the IMA building near Capital Hospital in Bhubaneswar. In hospitals where healthcare was not affected, doctors wore black badges to register their protest. The IMA has 41 branches and 3,600 members across Odisha.
The doctors protested against the Clinical Establishment Act, saying the step was neither people-friendly nor doctor friendly as its provisions restricted the freedom of the medical fraternity. IMA Odisha president Bijay Kumar Mishra urged the state government not to support it.
Arjun Sahu, a resident of Unit-VI in Bhubaneswar, said: “I went to a radiologist’s chamber at Forest Park for an ultrasound test, but the clinic was closed. Many patients from faraway areas such as Pipili, Khurda and even Puri were also waiting there.”
A team of IMA office-bearers later submitted a memorandum to the governor, the chief minister, the health minister, the chief secretary and the health secretary.
Slamming the Centre’s move to promote a bachelor’s degree in rural healthcare, Mishra said: “The half-hearted step will only produce inefficient medical practitioners and quacks who will kill more people in rural areas while carrying out their so-called healthcare delivery mission.”
He also requested the central government to initiate measure to produce more doctors, not “quacks”, to take care of the rural healthcare burden.
Giving an example of Odisha, Mishra said the state got its first government medical college in 1944, while two others came in 1959. But till date, neither the state government nor the Centre had taken any step to establish any more government-run medical college in Odisha.