Junior doctors ask for better facilities

Hyderabad: After the issuance of a circular to underline the duty timings for junior doctors by the Department of Medical Education of Tamil Nadu, the junior doctors at Gandhi and Osmania Hospital want a similar order for them as well.

According to the Supreme Court order, the junior doctors are not supposed to be working for more than 48 hours a week. However, as the junior doctors are working double or sometimes triple shifts for 12 hours a day or 36 hours a day in all the teaching hospitals of Osmania and Gandhi.

Expressing their agony, the junior doctors have appealed to the state government to issue an order on the lines of the one in Tamil Nadu, which will benefit all the junior doctors at the teaching colleges. Dr Syeda Asna Hashmi, a junior doctor from Gandhi Hospital, said, "We are working overtime without stipends. It's been seven months and we haven't even got even one month's stipend. We are made to do the work which the nurses are supposed to do, and the nurses just sit with their registers and make the entries."

"The biometric attendance monitoring is a new torture. Even on Sunday, when we don't have any duties, I have to come all the way from Attapur and enter the biometric. This doesn't happen in any place that I know of, except in Gandhi hospital," she lamented.

Dr Amara Sofia, a junior doctor at Osmania General Hospital, shares, "For the past seven months, we have been working day and night, yet we are not paid stipends. The department heads don't sign our logbooks on time, which delays the submission of pay slips, too.

The shifts are tricky. It depends on department to department. On a duty day, one works for around 20 hours or so, excluding the sleep shift. Sometimes it's a double duty, so it becomes 36 hours or something." "We were given just 12 leaves for the whole year, even though it is 30. After pleading, we were given 30, but it includes holidays or Sundays (basically the days which we don't input the biometric attendance)," she added further.

"We are made to do works like drawing samples, connecting fluids, putting Foley catheters, going around and getting blood packets for patients, and sometimes it's even for their reports," said Aiman Mohammadi, another junior doctor from Osmania Hospital