Professional obligations lost as greed prevails

Two hours of heart-wrenching scenes at the outpatient departments (OPDs) of the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) and the National Institute of Child Health (NICH) as patients, some cringing in pain, helplessly tried in vain to receive medical attention. But there was none for them as the doctors were boycotting the OPDs for two hours to protest the decentralisation of these two federal government-run hospitals.
Never did they take into consideration that so many patients, not only from Karachi but other parts of the province and Balochistan as well arrive every day to these hospitals, the majority of them in need of immediate medical attention. But no - personal gains are more important for them than professional obligations. Perhaps this plague has crept all over our society.
These doctors believe that the provincial government is not equipped to run the two hospitals efficiently and therefore, their administrative control should not be shifted from the Centre. They claim that the federal government-run hospitals are in a better shape than the one being run by the provincial government. There is no huge difference between the hospitals run by the Centre and the ones under the provincial government’s control. The federal government-run hospitals offer some better facilities and the reason for that is the free flow of funds that arrive from the Centre.
But the question is whether these funds are completely utilised or not when the governing authority is in Islamabad. This is actually the issue that is at the centre of the problem. The provincial government’s administrative control means a closer watch on the managements of the hospitals currently run by the federal government.
There will be all sorts of questions as to where the funds are being spent and why. This is exactly what the people behind the doctors’ boycott do not want. Greed gets the better of many of us, but in some exceptional cases, shamelessness hits an all new level.