IMA-AP seeks comprehensive legislation to restrain violence against doctors

VIJAYAWADA: The Indian Medical Association’s Andhra Pradesh state executive committee meeting has demanded comprehensive legislation against violence in the medical profession. IMA-AP state president Dr G. Ravi Krishna and secretary Dr P. Phanidhar said that the IMA state executive meeting was held at Guntur and expressed concern over attacks on the medical professionals, which were on the rise.

Dr Ravi Krishna said that it was evident from the recent incident in Kerala where a young lady doctor, Dr Vandana Das, was stabbed to death by a prisoner whom she was treating, and it was a failure of the police. He deplored that despite some legislation for the protection of medical professionals, the implementation was at fault; hence, IMA had been demanding a comprehensive law from the Central government.

Dr Phanidhar said that when there was an allegation of medical negligence against any medical practitioner, there were certain standard operating procedures that were to be followed by the law-enforcing department, which was pronounced by various courts, including the Supreme Court of India. He said that IMA demanded that an SOP should be formulated and circulated to all the police stations.

The IMA-AP thanked the AP government for extending the flagship programme Aarogyasri to many more diseases and requested that the due amounts be released to the network hospitals expediently and in good amounts so that they could meet their expenditure. The IMA-AP leaders said that the integrated medicine that was being proposed by the Central government on medical education was a very detrimental move by the government to integrate modern medicine with the other systems of medicine. It is not a good step on the part of the government to integrate all other systems of medicine like Ayurveda, Homoeopathy, etc. since philosophically they are different systems, they said.

The IMA-AP opposes the integrated medicine system as it will be detrimental to the health of the public and sought the union government’s help to stop the move.