100-120 hours a week duty, toxic work environment forcing young doctors to suicide: MARD writes to Governor

Addressing the issue of toxic Seniority leading to hostile work culture, MARD pointed out that in many institutes and multiple departments, resident doctors routinely face humiliation, public embarrassment, and indignity on a daily basis from the seniors of their respective departments. "The culture of mental abuse of junior doctors is glorified and surviving the hostility and cruelty is disguised as a metric to be passed to become a successful doctor. The fear of resident doctors of being failed in the exams by their seniors is exploited and used as leverage to prevent any protest," added the association. 

Hence, the association demanded that a monthly evaluation committee should be set up in every Medical College including the Dean, Faculties from Dept of Psychiatry, Faculties of every department, and Members of MARD. The objective of this committee would be to have a feedback mechanism from the residents to assess and maintain a healthy work culture within each department. Any red flag detected by this committee should be resolved at the earliest to prevent any unfortunate incident.

The residents also claimed that they routinely work 100-120 hours per week with on-call duties stretching to 36 hours at times. This inhumane work culture overburdens a Resident's mental state and leads to impulsive wrong decision-making when facing toxicity in their department. The residents also pointed out that the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has sent consolidated instructions to all states and union territories regarding the implementation of the Uniform Central Residency Scheme after the directives of the Supreme Court that clearly mentioned that the working hours of a Resident Doctor should not exceed 12 hours per day and the weekly working hours should not exceed 48 hours. 

Taking cognizance of this problem regarding the extra workload of the doctors, the association suggested setting up a State level Grievance Redressal Committee which will include the Members from Administration, Commissioner of Medical Education, Director of DMER, Central Mard, and representatives of all the Medical colleges of the state. The committee should have an online grievance portal that residents across the state can approach to highlight any kind of exploitation that they may face in their institute and are not comfortable to deal with at the local level due reputation of the accused. The objective of this committee would be to investigate such incidents and if found guilty then ensure appropriate punishment of the highest order to the perpetrator.

President of Central MARD, Abhijit Rajesh Helge also supported the demands and pointed out that It has been seen that residents consider choosing to commit suicide rather than just leaving the course because there exists a strict 10 lakh rupees seat leaving penalty for seat lapses. "At a time when a Resident is already under tremendous psychological pressure, a financial burden in the range of 20 lakh rupees further encourages the unfortunate resident to consider a certain death which seems to be the easier choice. They are compelled to work round the clock under the threat of a career-ruining financial burden," he added. 

Demanding respite from seat lapse penalty, the association stated, "We urge the administration to take the decision to penalize candidates for leaving a PG seat in a case-to-case basis manner to prevent encouragement of Suicides. Any candidate who aspires to leave his/her PG seat due to a toxic work environment should undergo a Psychiatric evaluation based upon which if the candidate is found to be in a vulnerable mental state, then his/her penalty amount should be written off to prevent further misery."