In safe city, Mumbai's junior women doctors say night duty scary sometimes

MUMBAI: Despite Mumbai’s reputation as a safe city for women, young female doctors find themselves navigating “a few frightening moments” during night shifts. It could be men lying on benches within the premises making inappropriate remarks or a drunken man and his friends behaving aggressively in the casualty.
A doctor in BMC-run KEM Hospital, Parel said, “In case of emergencies, we have to go from the casualty to the pathology lab carrying blood samples or reports, and that is quite a walk.Our roads are thoroughfare and anybody can get in at any time. Hence, it is a bit scary.” A senior doctor who has been on the campus for decades said many relatives sleep in the open, and there have been instances of female doctors being cat-called.

A female doctor from Thane Municipal Corporation-run Rajiv Gandhi Medical College in Kalwa recalled how relatives got aggressive while she was attending to a medico-legal case of a victim brought in with stab injuries.
Another doctor working in state-run Central Hospital in Ulhasnagar said most patients who come at night are either drunk or brought in after fights and accidents. “Their attitude towards female doctors is not good, but we have to manage the situation.”
Not surprisingly then, “security” has been the key discussion point between resident doctors and medical education authorities during the ongoing strike called in solidarity with the rape and murder of a woman doctor at a medical college in Kolkata last week. More CCTV cameras —“functional ones please,” they clarified—more security, and safe on-call rooms, said representatives of Maharashtra State Association of Resident Doctors (MARD).

Last week, resident doctors from state-run JJ Hospital who were posted for duty at group hospital, St George’s Hospital near CST, were forced to lock themselves in the minor OT after a staffer (who had head injuries) died and his friends vandalised the casualty as they claimed he wasn’t attended to for three hours. “The resident doctors had no alternative but to stay in the room for hours,” said a doctor from JJ Hospital.
A female doctor from a Kalyan civic hospital who is on night duty for one week every two months said, “There are fewer staff members on night duty as compared to day duty, and there aren’t enough security personnel, giving rise to anxiety,” she said. She said relatives get angry when their patient dies. “In such cases, we immediately call police.”
At the Kalwa medical college last week, a few relatives almost got violent with the on-duty doctors when they were told that their patient couldn’t get an ICU bed as the facility was full.
“There is no safe and proper facility for doctors to rest at the hospital, especially when most of them are working round the clock. Luckily, there has been no Kolkata-like incident reported here, but are we waiting for a tragedy to happen before acting?” asked Dr Sachin Patil, who is the Kalwa college’s MARD president.
Dr Pranay Khedkar from JJ Hospital’s MARD committee said, “It would be appropriate to say the risk of violence in colleges located in other cities and towns is higher, but it’s not zero in Mumbai.”