Editorials
On violence against patients
The rape and murder of a trainee doctor in RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata on August 9, 2024 was a brutal crime but had nothing to do with patients or violence by patients or their attendants against health workers. The accused is a civic volunteer who is said to have frequented the hospital as a tout, fleecing patients by promising to get them a bed or help them get tests done for free or at discounted rates [1]. However, following the incident, the protests by doctors, mostly resident doctors’ associations across the country, zeroed in on protection for doctors and health workers from violence and attacks by patients through a central law as one of their main demands [2].
Copyright and license ©Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 2024: Open Access and Distributed under the Creative Commons license ( CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits only non-commercial and non-modified sharing in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
An insightful article about a facet of patient care and security that is often overlooked. Every healthcare worker has witnessed patient abuse or violence at some point in their career or may even have been a perpetrator.
The solution lies first in accepting the fact that this exists and then making conscious decisions and choices to ensure that it does not continue.