The Public-Doctor-Public is a beautiful relationship that used to be. It is a mutually symbiotic relation we have not imagined but seen in reality. We see glimpses of it when we turn back time but fail to imagine even a cordial relation with the healthcare provider as of today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAgnishwar<\/em>\u201d, a Bengali movie by director Arabinda Mukhopadhyay, was a 1975 drama film about the life and perspective of a doctor with ideals. The story was inspired by the Bengali novel \u201cAgni<\/em>\u201d by Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay where a doctor lends moral backbone to the broken society of Bengal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n West Bengal today is witnessing a conflict between the doctors and public in the context of safety of doctors at work versus healthcare services’ safety for the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The inability to provide security to the doctors at work and the falling\nhealthcare system in this State is the cause of sheer negligence of the system-\nthe government in case of public hospitals & the business houses who own\nthe private sector healthcare services system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The public has been reacting in the last decade very strongly resulting in frequent violent physical altercations between the public and doctors which recently turned nasty wherein one junior intern doctor suffered severe head injuries in one of Kolkata\u2019s leading government medical college and hospital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This conflict was nothing but a reaction to the vicious chain whose\npattern is as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n A source which is the government, has not been providing infrastructure\n& security for on-duty doctors which makes it extremely difficult to\nprovide healthcare services to the public at par with the patent in knowledge\nof medicine and clinics that the doctors are trained with. This helpless situation\nof the professionals has been reflected in their service for which they have to\nface the wrath of the public which mostly turns into mob-hysteria, most of the\ntimes motivated & backed up with political support. This is because the\npublic finds it convenient to react by attacking the direct provider and not\nthe indirect providing source of which the indirect source takes advantage and,\nconveniently manages to turn volatile situations to violent ones so as to\ndivert from the core issue. Basically, the public and the doctors are falling\ninto the trap of fighting against each other whereas both should fight against\nthe system, at least the smaller & sensible community in this case which are\nthe doctors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Therefore, it is essential that \u2018The Revolt\u2019 by the Doctors should at first not be a reactionary step but a calculated effort towards building a better system by fighting against the system & not against the public. If one thinks about it patiently, the situation illustrates itself like the story of two monkeys fighting over a mango tree while the chimpanzee walks away with the mango!<\/p>\n\n\n\n