Staff Reporter :
Patients suffered immensely as doctors kept their private chambers closed across the country on Tuesday protesting assault on doctors and vandalism at the Central Hospital in the city following the death of a female student of Dhaka University on May 18.
The doctors observed the work abstention programme responding to the call of Bangladesh Medical Association (BMA).
Some patients were seen waiting at a doctor’s chamber in the city’s Dhanmondi area in the morning but the doctor did not turn up.
“My mother has been suffering from kidney and other diseases. I along with my brother have come from Dinajpur for my mother’s treatment. But after coming to the hospital I saw that there was no doctor there. I have been waiting since the morning,” Md Noman said at the Ibn Sina Diagnostic and Imaging Centre.
SM Towhidur Rahman, deputy manager of the diagnostic centre said, “We saw patients waiting in front of the doctors’ chamber for hours since this (Tuesday) morning”.
He added that the doctors enforced their work abstention up to 8:00pm.
Soon after Dhaka University student Afia Jahan Chaity died in the capital’s Central Hospital on Thursday, around a couple of hundred of her fellow students vandalised several rooms and equipment of the hospital and kept terrorising the entire facility until police reached there.
The DU authorities filed a case with Dhanmondi Police Station on charges of “negligence in treatment” accusing nine doctors and officials of the hospital. A doctor, arrested that night, got bail later, while others were granted bail on Monday.
To protest all these, BMA has decided to abstain from private practices across the country on Tuesday. It also decided to wear black badges from 8:00am to 2:30pm till Thursday and hold human chain at noon on that day.
Meanwhile, the students of Dhaka University will hold a human chain in front of the Aparajeyo Bangla on the campus demanding punishment to the doctors for their mistreatment.
They also threatened tougher movement if their demand was not met. Chaity, 20, was admitted at the private hospital on May 17 after doctors there diagnosed her with “acute myeloblastic leukaemia”, a type of blood cancer, read her medical files. Just before she died the following day, doctors confirmed that she actually had dengue fever, claimed students.
