Docs For Districts

THE announcement of setting up a Medical Sciences National Academy at Bir Hospital and the plan for providing specialised medical education and training is a welcome move that could have multiple benefits to Nepal's health sector. In effect now, Bir Hospital, the country's oldest public hospital turns into a medical academy plus a service provider. It was announced by Minister for Health Dr. Upendra Devkota on Sunday that the hospital would provide health service from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. from the coming Democracy Day on Wednesday. While this will surely benefit multitude of people who flock to this hospital because it is much more affordable than private hhospitals and clinics, the decision to conduct specialised medical education and training in order to produce specialists is bound to facilitate many doctors wishing to further their knowledge and skills through an on-the-job training. In absence of such post-graduate level courses many doctors with MBBS degrees have had no option but to go abroad if they wanted to acquire specialised knowledge. With the newly established academy, now they have the opportunity to be trained at the academy for five years under the tutelage of senior doctors in order to become a consultant doctor. What is significant in all this is the provision that in order to be eligible for this five-year course the doctors will have to have worked in remote regions at least for a year. Similarly, they would require, during the five-year course period, to work in the district or regional hospitals.

Many half-hearted efforts have been made in the past to get doctors to work in remote regions. But they have produced very little results and district hospitals in general hardly see a sufficient number of doctors willing to work there. The criterion on working in remote districts both prior to joining the course and receiving certification for medical consultancy as well as during the course, can be expected to address this problem of shortage of qualified doctors in districts outside the Kathmandu Valley where all doctors in this country seem to congregate on. This also does away with the past practice of acquiring the status of medical consultancy by practising medicine independently for five years. The more hands-on transfer of knowledge and skills from senior doctors to MBBS graduates during the course, planned to be conducted in conjunction with various hospitals and specialists, could also mean Nepal will have more qualified doctors who become really deserving of a consultancy certification. This could result in an improvement of overall quality of medical service.

Uproot It

DANG Deukhuri Valley in western Nepal, as per a news item carried by this daily the other day, seems to be fast gaining the dubious distinction of becoming a brisk supplier of domestic servants. As per the same report, parents are putting their daughters barely in their teens at the "depots" for sale. There, the landlords, after striking deals with the girls' parents, take them away to work as domestic servants in their homes. That such an exploitative system is fast emerging in the country, that too when all forms of human trade have been totally banned by the laws of the land, is not only indicative of the aberrations inherent within the nation's societal fabric but also of the concerned authorities' inability to enforce the existing laws enacted to ban all kinds of human exploitation. For, the above mentioned modus operandi being resorted to by some parents to sell, albeit for a limited time, their young daughters into servitude and for some landlords to purchase young girls from their parents for a price to work as domestic servants, by all counts, is indeed a modified form of human exploitation. Hence, if the nation's reputation is not to be sallied in the international fora dealing with the protection of human rights and the safeguarding of child rights, then it behooves upon the concerned authorities to speedily come up with measures to uproot it before it spread its monstrous tentacles to other areas. For, given the prevalence of abject poverty and want among the majority of the people, it would be quite foolhardy on the part of the concerned authorities not to assume otherwise. The nation's past experience with the just-recently banned Kamaiya system which forced whole families, that too, for generations, to slave away for their landlords-turned-money lenders is a case in point. As such, if this latest abnormality is to be nipped in the bud before it manages to transform itself into a monstrous issue and problem, then it looks to reason on the part of the concerned authorities to speedily delve into the reason (or reasons) as to how and why, within a short period of time after the total banning of the Kamaiya system, such a scandalous aberration could raise its terrible head within some sections of the Nepalese society. And, after identifying the reasons, come up with practical measures that would do away with this vicious aberration once and for all.