The campus of the Government Medical College Hospital (MCH) here has been a witness to many protests, strikes and hunger strikes by doctors in the past.
But on Tuesday, when over 80 doctors at the Regional Cancer Centre (RCC), situated within the MCH campus, came out in protest holding the banner ‘Save RCC’, the event was unprecedented. Never before in the hallowed history of the first and the oldest cancer care institution in the State have its doctors raised their voice in protest because they had been a contented lot. But they decided to protest on Tuesday because their back was to the wall, said the Doctors’ Association of RCC.
Doctors at the RCC said they were not striking work, they just took their ‘silent protest’ outside their own gates so as to draw attention to the numerous issues that have been smouldering within the institution for long and which seemed to be falling on deaf ears. The protest lasted just an hour.
The doctors said they took their protest to the public because what started off as merely administrative issues within the organisation had begun to threaten patient-care activities as well.
Doctors are upset that the RCC administration has done little to correct the anomalies in the salary matrix of doctors following the implementation of the 7th Pay Commission recommendations. Since 2016, they have been drawing an anomalous salary and despite several reminders and requests, the RCC administration and the government remained uncaring. Following a recent government order (GO), doctors have been denied TA and the HRA has been capped.
Doctors also pointed out that promotion interviews had been frozen in the organisation, affecting the career advancement of many. In RCC, promotions are linked to vacancies and the few who manage to make it as professors retire at 65 years, while the majority end up retiring at 62 years. This disparity in retirement age between professors and other doctors is another bone of discontent.
Most importantly, the RCC administration’s insistence on implementing a pension scheme deemed to be unviable has been one of the long-standing grievances of the employees. Several litigations on the pension scheme are pending before the High Court, which had ordered the RCC administration to get an agency to do an actuarial analysis of the scheme to decide its viability. The authorities have not yet done this.
The Doctors’ Association of the RCC, which organised the protest, said the administrative inefficiencies had reached a stage wherein the RCC was suffering from serious shortage of human resources at multiple levels and infrastructural deficiencies, which was choking patient care.
The number of patients had gone up several times while the staff shortage and infrastructural deficiencies remained unresolved. This was leading to huge delays in patient care at every turn, they said.
Though the association met Health Minister Veena George in the evening and even though the latter gave a patient hearing, no assurances or time frame on resolving the outstanding issues were given, it is learnt.
