Patients feel the brunt as health staff's stir continues
Manmeet Singh Gill
Tribune News Service
Amritsar, December 20
With the state government adopting indifferent attitude towards the demands of the Health Department employees, patients are the worst sufferers as ANMs, multipurpose health workers, nursing staff, junior resident doctors, ministerial workers and pharmacists are on protest path.
Of all these cadres, ANMs, nursing staff and resident doctors are on an indefinite strike till their demands are accepted. While some employees are holding protests demanding regular jobs, others are holding dharnas to get back the allowances which were withdrawn recently. Besides, junior resident doctors-cum-post graduate students are fighting for early joining of the new batch of PG students so that they can get the much-awaited relaxation from their clinical duties and focus on the academic aspect of their degrees.
Dr Brijesh Singla, general secretary, Resident Doctors’ Association of Punjab, said, “The new batch should have ideally joined at the start of this year, but it has not joined till date.” He said second-year and final-year junior residents (JRs) are overburdened. The JRs boycotted all services except emergency and Covid-relatives services.
As JRs and senior residents are the major medical service providers at government medical colleges, their absence from crucial duties have greatly hit poor patients who are admitted at IPDs.
To make matters worse, staff nurses at Government Medical College and other government hospitals, including CHCs and PHCs, are agitating to get special professional allowance and other issues. The protest by the nurses at GMC and JRs have crippled medical services.
Most cadres in the health and medical education department, except for PCMS doctors and faculty members, are holding protest. Punjab Pharmacist Officers’ Association leader Ashok Kumar said, “The Health Department is one of the largest departments in the state, but the core issues of its employees have always been neglected.” He added that apart from issues concerning contractual workers, various allowances earlier available to regular employees, including uniform allowance, travel allowance and others had been withdrawn.
