Private practice by Govt. hospital doctors

ENORMOUS Discomfort is being caused to patients across the country on account of discriminatory treatment being meted out to them by senior doctors of public sector hospitals who are more interested in providing treatment to the patients who come to them through their private clinics. For decades the masses in Pakistan unable to pay private fee to consultants are being discriminated against for their hospitalization and in-house treatment. The consultants are just not available or perhaps they have no time for such unprivileged patients. The influential persons however get preferential treatment in Government sector hospital “free of cost” because senior doctors would like to keep them in good humour to defend the doctors’ private practice.
It again goes to the credit of the apex court to have decided to review the entire system of Government doctors’ private practice which it has found to be discriminatory. A three-member bench of the Supreme Court hearing a complaint of criminal negligence by some doctors of a Government hospital in Chakwal expressed on Tuesday its grave concern over private practice of Government doctors who are more interested in the welfare of patients hospitalized through, or being treated at, their private clinics. The apex court has directed the Federal Health Secretary to provide assistance in formulation of a uniform policy of private practice by Government doctors. Apart from senior physicians, Government sector hospital surgeons would normally leave complicated surgery cases to be handled by junior doctors. Of course, senior surgeons perform surgeries or provide consultation to “influential” patients including those admitted through their private clinics. This unfortunate practice has assumed serious proportions over the years and resultantly patients who can not ordinarily afford to pay exorbitant fee at doctors’ private clinics somehow make arrangements to pay so as to get preferential treatment.
Some years back junior doctors who are being exploited by consultants in Government -hospitals staged country-wide protest calling for a ban on private practice by their seniors. Nothing happened as the senior doctors have their own clout and the policy-makers listen to them rather than the junior doctors. However, the senior doctors should be allowed to do private practice, as they must be properly remunerated for their expertise, professional background, training mostly abroad and academic background. Already, Army has allowed private practice to its doctors but only in the CMHs and military hospital premises in the evening. Aga Khan Hospital doctors as also consultants of a major private sector hospital do private practice within the premises of their hospitals. A portion of the fee charged by them is retained by the hospital and a major portion goes to the doctors. Same should be done in public sector hospitals where all possible facilities to meet any emergency are available. In fact, hundreds of serious patients treated at private clinics expire on account of non-availability of critical equipment and facilities. No ‘Government doctor should therefore be allowed to set up his own private clinic. If some one wishes otherwise, he may as well switch over to the private sector. One earnestly hopes that apex court’s intervention will eventually lead to public good.

Truth hurts

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s valedictory speech on the Middle East is worth careful study. Here is a man who knows much about the backroom maneuvers in New York and Washington before the Iraq invasion. Here is a man who tried to use his quiet style of diplomacy in order to avoid disaster. And here is a man who has been proven almost completely right. Yet even in his final official word on the matter, Annan did not berate the Bush administration for its refusal to listen to wise advice. Indeed he did not mention the president’s name at all. Instead, he set out a sober and dispassionate assessment of the region. He reaffirmed his long-held belief, now echoed by the Iraq Study Group Report, that a just settlement for the Palestinians is both essential and crucial to wider peace.
A UN secretary-general who has been so marginalized and ignored as Annan would have been justified in launching a spirited assault on the White House. But Annan allowed no note of rancor to creep into his speech. In stark contrast, Republican neocons immediately launched a vituperative personal attack on Annan himself. The basis for this was that the secretary-general had failed to clean up the corruption and inefficiency at the UN. This is an acknowledged shortcoming of the Annan decade at the UN, one acknowledged to some degree by Annan himself. But how Annan’s administrative failures could reasonably impact upon his judgment of the tensions and politics in the Middle East is something of a mystery. The response from the Bush camp was therefore both petty and utterly irrelevant.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice compounded the administration’s folly by saying that Annan had missed the opportunity to highlight the positive role that the United States has played in the region and in the war on terror. Just what, an informed person might ask, did Rice expect Annan to say? That after six years of the Bush administration, the Palestinians are happy to be imprisoned and bombarded within their own country by the Israelis? That as a result of US-backed Israeli aggression against Lebanon, Hezbollah has not been strengthened and does not threaten to plunge the country back into civil war? That the Iraqi government is entirely content that the only function it can truly carry out has to do with ministerial stationery within the Green Zone? That as a result of the Afghan and Iraqi invasions, the back of international terror has been broken and the world is a safer place?
The truth of course is that this US administration has perpetrated a catastrophic series of miscalculations in the Middle East which have left the world a vastly less safe place than it was immediately following 9/11. An ignorant and stubborn White House ignored all warnings, including those from the UN secretary-general who had unique access to all the players and therefore considerable insights. It is a testament to the stature of Annan that, diplomatic to the end, he revealed none of the inside knowledge he undoubtedly possesses. Nevertheless, political and moral pigmies still tried to savage his heels.

—Arab News