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Case for candid healing
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The joint secretary-general of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) talks to M. Dinesh Varma about the association's many-faceted activities and its concerns.
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Transparency in the treatment process could boost the relationship between doctors and patients, says Vinay Aggarwal, joint secretary-general of the Indian Medical Association (IMA).
Dr. Aggarwal, who is in the city in connection with the 77th all-India Medical Conference of the IMA, says the bottomline should be that the right of the patient and his family members to know about the medical procedures that are being attempted, the prognosis and amount of money involved, should be respected.
This message was being put across at IMA meetings and journals that reach out to its 1.50-lakh members across nearly 15,000 branches in the country, says Dr. Aggarwal, who is a past State president of the Delhi branch of the IMA.
The conscientisation drive against female foeticide that had been launched as an IMA-led initiative and had culminated in a major meeting of 60 religious leaders in New Delhi in 2001, had sort of boomeranged on the medical fraternity in the wake of the promulgation of the Pre Natal Diagnostic Tests (Prevention and Regulation) Act, he feels.
The IMA, which had led the campaign against female foeticide, which cleared the ground for such an Act, was now facing a situation where it had to protect the members from harassment by officials.
According to the IMA leader, the social issue had been reduced to the diagnostic use of the ultra sound machine. "The issue can hardly be addressed by taking on the medical practitioners alone. Only a mass sensitisation programme can work to redress this many-dimensional social issue,'' he says.
According to Dr. Aggarwal, by targeting only qualified medical practitioners, the doors were being opened for exploitation by quacks. Quackery is a termite in the health service sector and the IMA would press for the formulation of a proper Anti Quackery Bill.
The IMA, according to Dr. Aggarwal, was taking up with the Union Home Ministry the issue of what he calls the foisting of cases under Section 304 (murder) and 304 A (death due to negligence) against doctors.
``There has to be a clear-cut procedure to investigate charges of negligence by a panel of experts in place of the current practice of over-enthusiastic law enforcement personnel harassing medical practitioners," Dr. Aggarwal says.
The increasing attack on hospitals and employees and the controversial clauses in the Medical Council's code of conduct for doctors would be important issues at the national conference, he points out.
On the increasing complaints about corruption among doctors, Dr. Aggarwal feels that only a fraction of the practitioners were resorting to corrupt practices. The Government should increasingly engage the services of the private sector in national health policy initiatives. National health campaigns can succeed only through effective public/ private partnership.
However, it is unfortunate that the potential of the private sector, which accounted for 70 per cent of the health care services in the country, is largely ignored when it came to national health policies.
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Life
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Thiruvananthapuram
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