Chief minister Mamata Banerjee will address a doctors’ convention on Monday, her first such face-to-face meeting with senior as well as junior doctors from across the state since the RG Kar protests.
Mamata will interact with the medical fraternity for the first time since the junior doctors’ protests broke out in August last year following the rape and murder of the third-year postgraduate trainee at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital.
However, the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front, the umbrella body of junior doctors who spearheaded the RG Kar protests, said they would skip the convention.
“We have met the chief minister and the chief secretary earlier. We aired our grievances in those meetings. There is no need for another meeting. We now need ground action,” said Aniket Mahata, a junior doctor at RG Kar Medical College and a face of the junior doctors’ protests.
Over 2,500 doctors are expected to attend the convention. Invitation cards and entry passes have been issued to the medical colleges and hospitals.
Sourav Datta, chairperson of the committee, told The Telegraph on Sunday that they had sent out more than 2,500 invitations, based on demands from the medical college and hospitals. “We could not issue enough invites to the colleges in Calcutta though there was heavy demand. Most of the invites were issued to medical colleges outside Calcutta,” he said.
The principals of all medical colleges of Bengal will be present at Monday’s meeting, scheduled to be held from 11.30am at Dhano Dhanya Auditorium in Alipore. The state’s health secretary, Narayan Swroop Nigam, had written to heads of the medical colleges requesting their presence and to allow students and faculty members to attend the convention.
“I will be there as the principal but the medical superintendent will stay back to ensure that patient services are not hit. Thirty-four students and 24 faculty members from our college will attend the convention. The health department, while inviting us, made it clear that patient services must run uninterrupted,” said Karabi Baral, principal of Rampurhat Medical College and Hospital and secretary of Trinamool Congress’s recently-floated doctors’ body, Progressive Health Association (PHA).
Sources said the convention was unlikely to be interactive and the chief minister would air her views on specific issues. “It is not possible to let so many doctors speak. The chief minister will address the gathering and speak on specific issues,” said a member of the State Level Grievance Redressal Committee, the organisers of the convention. The committee was set up at the peak of the RG Kar protests.
The committee has been visiting hospitals and medical colleges since January, speaking to doctors and trying to ascertain their views on health services in the state.
The Telegraph reported on February 12 that at the committee’s interaction with doctors at two medical colleges in Calcutta, the medics flagged issues like the central referral system not taking off, vacancies, or lack of them, at hospitals affecting patient services, and a shortage of Ringer’s lactate solution.
The central referral system was meant to ensure that a government hospital referred a patient to another state-run facility only if the latter had a vacant bed and facilities to treat the patient.
There was an initial pilot run, but the system is yet to take off.
