New Delhi: Dr Narayani is used to back-breaking shifts that can extend to up to 60 hours in a go, without access to clean washrooms. The few minutes of rest she gets during breaks are spent napping on a chair behind a nursing station.
The story is not exclusive to her. Resident doctors across India complain of inadequate measures taken by hospitals and colleges for their well being. And now the incident from RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata, where a post graduate trainee doctor was raped and murdered at the hospital’s seminar room during the night shift, has further shaken them.
“I am more familiar with the hospital than my own hostel room, because that’s where I spend most of my time,” said Dr Narayani.
She never felt unsafe at the place she knew like the back of her hand, but now she’s not so sure.
“What happened to the doctor at RG Kar can really happen to anyone,” she said.
After the horrifying rape and murder in Kolkata, associations of doctors are on strike across the country. Doctors bodies like the Federation of All India Medical Association (FAIMA) and the Federation of Resident Doctors’ Association (FORDA) are demanding the implementation of the Central Protection Act, to ensure the safety and security of doctors.
Women doctors continue to be susceptible to violence in face of inadequate infrastructure, facilities, and security measures within hospitals that force them to rest in unmonitored and dingy corners. The long night shifts at hospitals are even longer for women with no place to sleep, filthy washrooms, and lack of awareness about POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harassment) commitees at colleges and hospitals.
Nowhere to rest
For a general medicine doctor working in Hyderabad, the RG Kar Hospital rape-murder was personal. “I take rest in seminar rooms so often. I used to prepare for exams and study there during long shifts. I can’t believe what’s happened at RG Kar,” she said.
The doctor recalled the days of her residency when there were no proper places to take rest at the hospital.
“If you’re a junior doctor and your male senior is resting in the doctor’s room, then you cannot go there. You have to sit outside on the stool or find some other place to close your eyes for a bit,” the doctor said, adding that “often these doctor resting rooms are also in some dark dingy corner of the hospital so women usually avoid going there.”
Other doctors that spoke to ThePrint shared similar experiences. “There are doctor rooms where there’s no washroom, no bed, not even a fan! Just stools to sit on,” said Narayani.
She added that despite their long shifts doctor duty rooms have strict timings and are not open at night.
“It often feels like resident doctors are not humans. Our colleges and hospitals don’t think about us at all,” she said.
Dr Dipshikha Ghosh from Kolkata shared that doctor duty rooms often have either glass or wooden doors that don’t even have a latch, so sleeping in these rooms is extremely difficult.
During her time as a resident, Dr Ghosh said she would have to find an empty stretcher or an empty procedure room to close her eyes and rest. “We’re a transient crowd. Gone in three years, no hospital—private or government—is thinking of us,” she said.
But it’s not just the lack of designated resting spaces that are a cause for concern. Interns and residents, serving in various departments, often run from pillar to post in hospitals to fetch a test report, blood samples, or an emergency medicine.
In the process, they have to cross abandoned corridors, unguarded wings of hospitals, and labs. If they fall sick during a shift, they go on a hunt for a bed in the hospital so that they can lie down. There are often no security guards at the gates and no CCTVs either. They just have to gulp down their fear and apprehension, say a prayer, and run across from one place to another.
“We’re operating on blind faith. Anything could happen to us and nobody would even know. But this is our job so we have to do it,” an intern at a hospital in Cuttack, Odisha said. She often has to go from one hospital building to another in the dead of the night. The campus is huge and deserted— it’s not a safe walk.
“This is why sometimes family members don’t allow women to do night shifts. Because it is unsafe. Then people wonder why women in the workforce are reducing,” said Dr Ghosh.
She emphasised that medicine is a deeply sexist place.
“Almost all executive places are occupied by men who don’t even consider the possibility of someone feeling unsafe. People just assume: what can happen at a hospital? And go ahead with it,” she said.
Also read: We were groped by patients, had no toilets—don’t wait for rape to care for women doctors
No washrooms, awareness about POSH
There’s no access to clean, or doctor-exclusive washrooms to residents working through the night.
“We’re not given keys to washrooms. If the nurse in-charge leaves then we are left with no choice but to use public washrooms. Otherwise we have to beg the nurses to give us a key. Sometimes sisters probably have keys but they just don’t want to share them with us,” the doctor of general medicine in Hyderabad claimed.
Resident doctors have nowhere to go and file complaints. And it’s even more difficult for women-centric demands to be fulfilled by associations largely led by men.
The president, chairperson, vice chairperson, and the national secretary of FAIMA are all men.
Five out of nine national joint secretaries of FAIMA seem to be women, as per the list of names seen in their public documents, while only four out of 25 state in-charges are women. All five top leadership positions at FORDA are also occupied by men, and only a handful of women doctors feature on the executive members list in other key roles.
But the clamour for separate rooms, guards, and CCTV cameras is growing on social media in the wake of the heinous crime committed in Kolkata.
ThePrint interviewed doctors from Cuttack, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Ludhiana, none of them had any knowledge of internal committees under the POSH Act at their hospitals, to which they can report sexual harassment.
“When I had filed a case of sexual harassment against a fellow doctor, my hospital told me they don’t have a POSH committee in the first place. And later, the hearings were delayed for one reason or another,” a doctor at a private hospital in Delhi said on the condition of anonymity.
But some WhatsApp groups of hospitals with admin staff and employees as members are now getting information about formation of POSH committees by the hospital management. But the demands of women doctors centre around one thing—they want their workplaces to treat them as human beings.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)