Not all such incidents occur in the immediate aftermath of a treatment gone wrong. A dentist in China was knifed more than 30 times in 2016 by his patient 25 years after treatment. The patient was demanding compensation for discolouration of his teeth.

WHO data shows that between 8-38 per cent of physicians have experienced violence at least once in their medical career. In Asia, China and India experience the highest incidence of violence against doctors, at 90 per cent and 77.3 per cent, respectively.

Medical vandalism also takes place in countries with greater economic prosperity and public safety records. A large number of primary care physicians in developed nations like Germany and Bulgaria also face significant incidents of violence.

The most violent venues are emergency and intensive care units (ICU), and the most violent time is visiting hours. Common reasons for violence emerging from this researcher’s field study are death of patients, lack of medicine, delay in treatment and inadequate attention.

Doctors’ Experiences 

During fieldwork in December, a staff nurse in Faridabad district, Haryana, shared that facing verbal abuse was a normal event for doctors, which they would try to reduce by communicating facts amicably to the patients, mostly villagers.

The health worker noted that vandalism had increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Villagers once uprooted the gate of the community health centre she worked in, destroyed the glass window panes and broke its iron doors, after the death of their relatives from not getting the required vaccines in time.

Despite the shortage of doctors, a substantial number of medical graduates choose not to enter the professional field and prefer more lucrative and safer jobs such as consulting, digital health startups and wearable technology development, pharmaceutical options like drug development, clinical trials and regulatory affairs, and non clinical alternatives such as policy-making, hospital operations, and strategic planning.

Loss Of Public Trust

The underlying violence towards medical providers is the result of a loss of public trust in healthcare personnel, primarily due to systemic inefficiencies.

These trust issues emerge as ‘neglect’, resulting in retaliation and revengeful assault towards medical personnel, the sole providers of trust during a health emergency.

Violence against doctors will continue, if public trust in the health system is not improved through behaviour change strategies — such as training doctors with the ability and skill to work effectively in culturally diverse environments, their promotion through social media, and the involvement of local governance in advocating these behaviours.

The public health system has come a long way since the Bhore Committee was set up in 1946 towards establishing a healthcare framework through promoting equitable access, preventive care, control over epidemics, health education and economic benefits to poor families.

However, resource constraints, inconsistent quality of care and limited focus on personalised treatment plans reduce public trust in medical providers.

What Are The Solutions

Lack of awareness of health policies related to prevention of violence, non-reporting of violence by doctors, lack of consensus among authorities and bureaucratic delays in remedial proceedings, leads to its perpetuation.

Violence against medical professionals via cyberbullying, a feature of our digitised lives, can be captured, rectified and resolved through better data and digital platform privacy norms.

A legal mechanism for preventing violence against doctors, with the revision of existing medicare service legal provisions, can offer a platform towards creating a database of violence against the medical fraternity and usher greater accountability towards remedial actions.

Policy measures can be adequately combined with institutional structures through active grievance redressal cells engaged in tracking violent behaviour, monitoring and evaluation, providing institutional and psychological support to promote professional conduct in the hospital premises and promoting harmonious doctor-patient relationship policies.

As part of grievance cell activity, mediation by appointed representatives during such attacks to provide a clear distinction of medical duties, explain the patient’s health condition and any systemic blockages to the family, can help to address patients’ anger towards the medical staff.

An indemnity insurance against bodily injury/death or legal suits caused by error or negligence, is a must for every doctor and hospital, whether public or private.

These policy measures can be charted out by health policy makers, along with rectifying actions such as fines and taking corrective legal action for harm caused due to violence.

Medical professionals who sustain the edifice of the healthcare system deserve not only to be protected against violence, but also respected and valued for their services to society.

(The writer is associate professor of Public Policy at Manav Rachna International Institute of Research and Studies. Views are personal)

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™