No practice?

There was a report in The News (April 18) that 66 trainee nurses at DHQ Hospital, Jhang refused to go back to work till they were paid their monthly stipend money pending for the last five months. Around the same time young doctors in Lahore were manhandled by the police for demanding PPEs. Prior to that, over 60 doctors in Quetta were thrown in jail for insisting that they be provided with PPEs. Shocking, to say the least.

However, on the other hand you have 85,000 trained women doctors who are sitting at home and not practising. You also have police officers, Foreign Office officers and other civil servants who studied medicine but then decided to change careers. I have no objection to anyone deciding not to practise medicine. What I do object to is why they are wasting taxpayers' money by studying at government-run medical colleges without practising. I have heard that some mothers-in-law insist on having a daughter-in-law so that they can show off, but when she comes to the house she is forced to give up her profession. Already the doctor-patient ratio in Pakistan is one of the lowest in the world. And the country can ill afford such a huge waste of money and human resources. It is time things change. The government should make it a policy that any doctor who graduates from a taxpayer-funded medical college will have to serve a minimum of five years as a doctor or refund the double the amount that was spent on training them. I wonder how many PPEs could have been bought for the cost of training such doctors.

Syed Hussein El-Edroos

Islamabad