For many months, indeed for more than a year, the Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA) was holding the country and its millions of patients to ransom, dangling the threat of strike action under the guise of agitating against the South Asian Institute of Technology and Medicine (SAITM).
GMOA
Now that the government has announced that SAITM has been abolished and has worked out a comprehensive formula that addresses not only the issue of standards in private medical education but also the fate of those who are already enrolled as students at SAITM, one would assume the GMOA would shut up. Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the hospital without watching the previous day’s news first to see whether the doctors were on strike, the GMOA has assured us they won’t let the New Year dampen their enthusiasm they will be at it yet again.
This time, it will be a so-called ‘lightning’ strike, one without adequate warning, so that patients will suffer inconvenience, not having the opportunity to make alternate arrangements or refrain from attending their clinics, for instance. Ah, how thoughtful of these medical professionals who, we are told, are doctors of ‘good quality’.
State medical faculties
It doesn’t matter to the GMOA that a government committee headed by the learned Dr. Harsha de Silva a man even his critics won’t accuse of political opportunism has, after a great deal of hard work, come up with a solution. It doesn’t matter to the GMOA that the Deans of state medical faculties agree in principle with this formula. It doesn’t matter to them that the Sri Lanka Medical Council (SLMC) is also in agreement.
It doesn’t matter to them that students of state medical faculties, who boycotted lectures blighting a year of their youth, have now gone back to work. What matters to the GMOA is that they have not got their pound of flesh: the government declaring that private medical education is no longer allowed in Sri Lanka.
That, and another, entirely separate issue: allowances related to their salaries. Obviously, the GMOA believes, it knows it all and it knows best.
Private medical education
Not all the other medical experts, regulatory bodies and political authorities put together can have the wisdom that a few people sitting in the committees of the GMOA possess. They have decided that private medical education in this country shall not exist and so be it.
Who are we, mere lesser mortals, to argue with the intellectual might of the GMOA? Their argument is that medical education must not be a privilege. It must be decided on merit, nothing but merit and solely on merit.
That is because, they argue, doctors decide on life and death issues on average citizens and therefore play God; so the right to become a doctor must not be tainted with merely having the means to pay for it. It must be only acquired on the strength of your intellect, on nothing else.
Public sector employees
But, armed with a medical degree, what do the doctors of the GMOA then proceed to do? They go on to demand every special privilege under the sun. They want extra allowances that no other public sector employees are granted and they also want their children admitted to elite schools for which every occupation has a lesser right.
Is it fair for a group of people who insist on merit to be the only criterion for access to a medical education to demand something other than merit the parents’ occupation to be a criterion when it comes to the education of their own children? Or is it hypocrisy at its worst from the followers of Hippocrates? Is it fair for a group of people who insist on the ability to pay not to be a criterion for accessing medical education to insist on the ability to pay to be a criterion when citizens access their services in numerous channelling centres often at ungodly hours? Or is that too yet another example of their hypocrisy?
Why is it that this group of trade unionists for it is now a disgrace to call them doctors who insist on the most meticulous standards being maintained for medical education forget to maintain any sort of standard in the care of their patients, by literally seeing more than a dozen patients in an hour, spending less than five minutes per patient? Surely, standards in medical education should translate into standards in patient care, should they not? The past months have shown beyond any degree of doubt that the GMOA is beyond reform as long as its current coterie of committee members control the union.
SAITM
So, there is no value in negotiating with them. Come up with a solution to their demands and they will come up with yet another demand, as they did with SAITM.
The question therefore is, why the government is soft-pedalling on them. The matter of whether private medical education is allowed in Sri Lanka is not one for the GMOA.
It is a matter for the government of the day to answer. And, the government has answered ‘yes’. Of course, the GMOA has the right to protest if they feel the standards of the profession are being compromised as they did with SAITM.
But now that the standards issue has been dealt with in the most comprehensive manner, the GMOA should shut up, mind its business and do its job which is caring for sick people which they have been neglecting to do properly for the past so many months.
If they cannot do that, it is high time the government cracked the whip: declare the service of doctors an essential service and impose harsh punishments on those who do not comply with that order. After all, they owe their livelihood to the government that gave them free education- and it is time they repaid the debt they owed, instead of making demand after demand, and offering excuse after excuse on why they should stage another strike.
The time has come for the government to act tough on the GMOA, or else, the government will suffer the same fate as that of the GMOA- lose all credibility and become the laughing stock of the public!