RG Kar Hospital horror: Five years ago, the Trinamool Congress government of West Bengal pledged to clamp down on violence against doctors. It promised public hospitals better security equipment, female guards to support female physicians and controlled entry points, according to an internal government memo seen by Reuters.
None of these measures had been implemented at the public hospital where a young female doctor was sexually assaulted and killed on Aug. 9, allegedly by a police volunteer, four trainee doctors there told Reuters.
Instead, in the days leading up to the homicide-assault, which prompted nationwide outrage and a doctors strike, only two male guards manned RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, they said. According to the trainees, they were supplemented by a few closed circuit cameras that did not comprehensively cover the sprawling premises.
One of the doors of the lecture hall where the doctor had been resting during a 36-hour shift when she was attacked had no lock, said two other trainee doctors who had also slept there. The air conditioning in the designated break room had malfunctioned, they said.
After two doctors at a different hospital were assaulted by a patient's relatives in 2019, West Bengal had promised to install "effective security equipment and systems," regulate entry and exit to hospital premises and create a compensation policy for assaulted staff, according to the state health department memo dated June 17, 2019.
The two-page document, which is reported by Reuters for the first time, was prepared after chief minister Mamata Banerjee met that day with trainee doctors protesting the attack on their colleagues as a "record note" of the interaction. The memo did not state to whom it was addressed.
Dr Shreya Shaw, a postgraduate trainee at R.G. Kar hospital, said she found two strangers shaking her awake at around 3 a.m. when she was sleeping in a designated rest room, which did not have locks. "It was initially quite scary to wake up to unknown men in the dark," she said, adding that she was shocked the patients could enter the floor where she was resting without being stopped.
LIVING HER DREAM
The 31-year Kolkata physician, whose battered, half-naked body was found by colleagues, had always wanted to be a doctor, family members and friends told Reuters. "When I bumped into her last year, she told me she was very happy and was living her dream," said Somojit Moulik, who had studied with the victim in medical school. When Reuters visited the victim's family home, the nameplate bore only her name with the prefix Dr, in an indication of how highly her relatives valued her achievements. Her aunt said in an interview that her niece had been set to marry a physician she had studied with later this year, and that she had not complained about safety issues at work.
With Reuters inputs
