Southern States - Kerala

Doctors' reservations on `Code of Conduct'

By Our Staff Reporter

KOTTAYAM JUNE 14. The Kerala Government Medical College Teachers' Association (KGMCTA) today welcomed the introduction of a code of conduct for medical practitioners, but pointed to some of the deficiencies in the directives and also expressed reservation about the applicability of these codes in the light of lack of necessary infrastructure for their implementation in the State.

Speaking to mediapersons on the occasion of the 34th annual conference of the KGMCTA here today, the State secretary, Tigy Thomas Jacob, the organising committee chairman, Dayananda Babu, and the vice-chairman, Roy Abraham Kallivayalil, expressed apprehensions regarding the practicability of keeping the medical records of all the patients who consult them every day since medical college hospitals keep records of only the inpatients. On an average, the IP section constitutes only 10 per cent of the total intake of patients at the various medical college hospitals.

According to them, the directive will be practicable only if the Government makes necessary arrangements for the upgradation of medical records facilities by appointing more hands and goes in for computerisation of medical records. The pertinent question here is whether doctors would be made liable for the upkeep of medical records or not, they said and pointed out that this area of operation comes under the administrative department, basically.

In the case of private consultations they conduct, at present, the patients are entrusted with the responsibility of keeping their medical records. If the doctors are made responsible for keeping the records, they would have to create their own infrastructure which would result in a steep rise in consultation fees, they pointed out.

While they welcomed the directive to exhibit consultation charges, they pointed out that earlier experiences of some of the doctors who exhibited their consultation fee were not very encouraging as they found themselves at the receiving end of public ire. According them, the directives are basically a response to the North Indian situation and it was not clear whether the people in Kerala would welcome such an initiative. Earlier, experiments by doctors to exhibit their consultation fee were met with people's wrath as they took it as an attempt to scare away the poorer sections of the population, they said.

The directive regarding emergency care was also greeted with apprehension by the doctors as they believed that the Consumer Protection Act did not differentiate between comprehensive care and emergency care.

If your service is at default, you are liable, they pointed out. The code of conduct does not talk about the role of medical facilities in this regard and just being a doctor, you many not be able to provide service, they said.

They pointed out that even after half a century of independence, the State authorities had failed to enact a Kerala Medical Practitioners' Act.

Even today, the State was governed by the Travancore-Cochin Medical Practitioners' Act whose applicability, in the strict sense, could be questionable in the Malabar area.

In fact, the constituency of Travancore Cochin medical practitioners has been lying vacant in the Medical Council of India for more than a decade now, as the authorities had not bothered to hold elections.

Even the Mahatma Gandhi University has failed to fill the vacancy for its representative in the council for the past three years, they pointed out. Such an attitude on the part of the authorities proved the low priority the profession had in their scheme of things.

Under such circumstances, the code of conduct, in the wrong hands, could take draconian dimensions, they said.

They pointed out that there had been no attempt to initiate a dialogue with the medical fraternity in the State before the implementation of the code of conduct.

A detailed discussion would have helped to adapt the directives of the MCI to the ground realities in Kerala, to correct the deficiencies and also to initiate steps for the setting up of necessary infrastructure for its effective implementation, they said.

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