MARD miffed at patient getting bail

Nagpur: Resident doctors of Indira Gandhi Government Medical College and Hospital (IGGMCH) are miffed that a patient who assaulted doctors in the OPD on Friday, was released on bail within no time. The residents pointed out that most people arrested for assault on doctors get bail easily despite it being a non-bailable offence. During the OPD hours on Friday morning, 20-year-old Charan Ingole complained of abdomen pain and insisted on being attended to immediately.The doctors on duty told him to wait until they were done with the current patient. On being told to wait for a while, the patient slapped the resident doctor. When they intervened, he even assaulted some of the senior doctors. The college’s chapter of Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors (MARD) filed a complaint with the Tehsil police who arrested the Shanti Nagar resident.
“The Maharashtra Medical Practitioners Protection Act, 2010 under which such offences are registered is a non-bailable one. However, a Supreme Court ruling said that getting bail is possible for any offence whose punishment is less than seven years. Since the imprisonment under the act is only up to five years, it is easy for offenders to walk away easily,” said MARD president Dr Sagar Mundhada.
He also said that since the SC ruling left the MMPPA redundant, MARD had written a letter to chief minister Devendra Fadnavis informing how the act doesn’t help dissuade people from assaulting doctors. “We had explained the bad security scenario in government hospitals across the state. We also wrote about how common such assaults on doctors had become in Maharashtra. We had also demanded that the punishment under this act be extended to eight years to give it some teeth,” said Dr Mundhada. MARD has not got any response on the topic from the state government till date.
“When we asked the police how the assaulter got the bail so soon, they only said that it was the court’s discretion. One of the problems in such cases is that the concerned institution hardly comes forward to initiate the legal proceedings. Residents are still students, and its not possible to represent the institution in court in every one of these hearings,” said Dr Tushar Patil, the general secretary of MARD IGMCH. He believes that institutions should take a more proactive part in the legal aspects of such cases.