Workplace violence against doctors is an unfortunate reality of medical practice across the globe. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), workplace violence is defined as “incidents where staff is abused, threatened, or assaulted in circumstances related to their work, including commuting to and from work, involving an explicit or implicit challenge to their safety, well-being, or health”. The healthcare sector witnesses a significant proportion of violence, especially against primary healthcare providers such as doctors and nurses that negatively impacts their physical and psychological well-being, which ultimately limits their work performance and job satisfaction. This affects the functioning and efficiency of the whole healthcare system in the long term.
To discuss about the reasons and preventions of this violence, we invited Dr Uma Kumar, HOD, Rheumatology department AIIMS in second segment of the week-long independence-day campaign.
“While communicating with patients, one cannot be very mechanical. One has to show sympathy and empathy also. Someone who is not aware about a particular problem or diseases would react very differently, and if patients is actually explained about everything very clearly and categorically, the chances are that one would understand and would not react violently or in abusive manner,” said Dr Kumar.
When asked about the attitude change that people need to bring, Dr Uma said,
“These days you would be knowing that people google about everything and they kind of acquire complete information from internet and from various media channels. When they are coming to the doctors, they are thinking that they have a particular problem, they need a particular investigation. Even when they have diagnosed themselves by doing certain investigations, they have certain kind of expectations. When they go to public hospitals or they are going to a private hospital they will have different types of expectations.”
According to Dr Uma Kumar,
“When we talk about the medical services, it is not so simple. That includes a lot of things and it it’s not about bed and oxygen and ventilator, it’s about human resource. Doctors cannot be produced overnight, nursing staff cannot be produced overnight. For that matter any health care professional cannot be produced overnight. Then we start comparing ourselves with the western world where doctor-patient ratio is much better than what we have, but look at them. Many of you visited western world and must have seen how you get the consult. It takes months to reach a superspecialist doctors, then we don’t say that we are better. In this corona time covid happened all over the world and the western countries were overwhelmed. So it’s not right that we start blaming the system, because we also hold some responsibility having said that. Yes you are right we need to spend more on our health because country’s economy and country’s health depends on individual health’s so we cannot progress or go forward until and unless the health of the people of the country is given a due importance.”
