Tag: Doctors

  • Zard Patton Ka Bunn episode 10 reveals challenges for doctors in remote areas

    Zard Patton Ka Bunn episode 10 reveals challenges for doctors in remote areas

     

    Episode 10 of Zard Patton Ka Bunn showed the harsh reality of rural Pakistan, where children are forced into labour and violence with no support from parents, or even the law.

     

     It highlighted the poor situation of medical facilities in villages. People living outside big cities struggle to access basic healthcare facilities.

     

    It bravely portrayed the violence these children endure. Dr. Nofil’s character sheds light on the difficulties faced by medical professionals working in villages.

     

    They confront numerous challenges, from limited resources to societal pressures.
    Despite tackling heavy issues like overpopulation, women’s education, reproductive health, and child labour, the drama balances it out with comedy and light-hearted moments. Zard Patton Ka Bunn wants us to be entertained and think about these issues.

     

    Talking about things like healthcare, children’s rights, and doctors’ challenges makes us see our problems more clearly. It’s a mirror for our culture, showing us the realities we often ignore. The drama has a talented cast, including Sajal Aly, Hamza Sohail, Ali Tahir, Samiya Mumtaz, and Rehan Sheikh. It is written by Mustafa Afridi and directed by Saife Hasan.

  • S. Korea starts procedures to suspend licences of 4,900 striking doctors

    S. Korea starts procedures to suspend licences of 4,900 striking doctors

    South Korea said Monday it had started procedures to suspend the medical licenses of 4,900 junior doctors who have resigned and stopped working to protest government medical training reforms, causing health care chaos.

    The walkout, which started February 20, is over government plans to sharply increase the number of doctors, which it says is essential to combat shortages and South Korea’s rapidly aging population, while the medics argue it will erode service quality.

    Nearly 12,000 junior doctors — 93 percent of the trainee workforce — were not in their hospitals at the last count, despite government back to work orders and threats of legal action, forcing Seoul to mobilize military medics and millions of dollars in state reserves to help.

    The Health Ministry on Monday said it had sent administrative notifications — the first step to suspending the doctors’ medical licenses — to thousands of trainee doctors after they defied specific orders telling them to return to their hospitals.

    “As of March 8 (notifications) have been sent to more than 4,900 trainee doctors,” Chun Byung-wang, director of the health and medical policy division at the health ministry, told reporters.

    The government has previously warned striking doctors they face a three month suspension of their licenses, a punishment which, it says, will delay by at least a year their ability to qualify as specialists.

    Chun urged the striking medics to return to their patients.

    “The government will take into account the circumstance and protect trainee doctors if they return to work before the administrative measure is complete,” he said, indicating doctors who come back to work now could avoid the punishment.

    “The government will not give up dialogue. The door for dialogue is always open … The government will respect and listen to opinions of the medical community as a companion for the medical reforms,” he added.

    The government last week announced new measures to improve pay and conditions for trainee medics, plus a review of the continuous 36-hour work period, which is a major gripe of junior doctors.

    The strikes have led to surgery cancelations, long wait times and delayed treatments at major hospitals.

    Seoul has mobilized military doctors and earmarked millions of dollars of state reserves to ease service shortfalls, but has denied that there is a full-blown health care crisis.

    Military doctors will start working in civilian hospitals from Wednesday this week, Chun said.

    Under South Korean law, doctors are restricted from striking, and the health ministry has asked police to investigate people connected to the work stoppage.

    The government is pushing to admit 2,000 more students to medical schools annually from next year to address what it calls one of the lowest doctor-to-population ratios among developed nations.

    Doctors say they fear the reform will erode the quality of service and medical education, but proponents accuse medics of trying to safeguard their salaries and social status.

  • “It’s inhumane”: Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan describes conditions Gaza doctors are working in

    “It’s inhumane”: Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan describes conditions Gaza doctors are working in

    Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a paediatric intensive care doctor for Doctors Without Borders and a co-founder of the GazaMedicVoices social platform, reflects in an interview on the on-going struggle of doctors in Gaza who are working under dearth of basic medical supplies.

    “I refuse to let my imagination go to the places where reality has taken us in these last three weeks.” she said.

    “Everyday I feel like things can’t get worse, and then they seem to get worse.”

    Dr. Tanya asserted Gaza doctors are “World class experts in the field of medicine and in the field of mass casualties” but she goes on to remark that having to carry out medical procedures without pain control or anaesthesia “makes it sound very barbaric.”

    With “hands tied” and being “stripped of every tool” used in modern medicine — from anaesthesia to ventilators and monitors — it is an unfathomable place to be in, she described.

    “I can’t fathom being in the position that they are in,” she stated, highlighting that the doctors in Gaza are working every day despite the trauma they are seeing, despite fear for their family’s well being, despite fear for their own life, and constantly being threatened to be bombed in the health facility because they “refuse to leave” their patients and evacuate.

    “I’ve never been in that position and I don’t know many people that have been in that position to be honest. The conditions that we’re seeing in the Gaza strip right now are unthinkable.” she added, calling it “unprecedented in modern times”.

    She further highlighted in her interview that the children there are coming in with 70-90 per cent of their bodies burned, stressing that doctors would normally and “obviously” give them immediate pain control. And a regular change of dressing would be carried out under sterile conditions; and if the burns are extensive, they are put to sleep for the process because it is so “exquisitely painful”.

    But in Gaza, pain relief is not an option.

    Dr. Tanya also quoted the doctors currently serving in Gaza who, to describe their situation, used words like “inhumane”, “intolerable”, “unbearable”.

    “They are crying out to the outside world and many of them are giving up. They’re saying the world has come together to eliminate us,” she reiterated.

    Others say, “They are deaf and blind to our suffering. All we have is God.”

  • Shehzad Roy wants to hold unethical doctors accountable in Pakistan

    Shehzad Roy wants to hold unethical doctors accountable in Pakistan

    The internet’s favourite celebrity, Shehzad Roy, wants that doctors in Pakistan are no longer allowed to get away with medical malpractice or unprofessional behavior.

    In a viral tweet, the singer and philanthropist has encouraged social media users to come forward with their own experiences.

    The singer and philanthropist had wrote: “We need to hold doctors accountable for how they speak to their patients. Ive heard so many stories about how even renowned doctors humiliate their patients. Docs, please remember that a kind word sometimes goes much further than any pill u can prescribe”

    His viral tweet got many other users to share their experience of interacting with unprofessional doctors. One user wrote:

    “2 weeks ago a doc gave my children 1 min each after a wait of almost 2 hours (confirmed appointment). She didn’t check their throat or ear or chest, even though they were complaining of inflammation. My turn she was looking at the wrong file. Some doctors just don’t care.”

  • Suspect in KP MDCAT bluetooth scam has been identified

    Suspect in KP MDCAT bluetooth scam has been identified

    The suspected mastermind behind the MDCAT test cheating scam in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has been identified. The accused has been alleged to have helped candidates cheat through Bluetooth devices.

    Sources have told Jang that the accused turned out to be a former employee of the Public Service Commission and the Federal Public Service Commission, and was aware of the frailties of the testing system.

    Moreover, he had ordered Bluetooth devices from China and would entice medical test candidates to cheat.

    He would also send his operatives in the examination hall to leak the tests.

    The accused has earned hundreds of thousands of rupees in return for aiding candidates to pass the MDCAT.

  • 35 per cent of female medical graduates are unemployed

    35 per cent of female medical graduates are unemployed

    Gallup Pakistan and PRIDE have conducted a combined research, revealing that up to 35 percent of female doctors in Pakistan are currently without a job.

    The research is based on the Labour Force Survey of 2020-21 and has analysed Pakistan Bureau of Statistics’ data on the labour market, collected from 99,900 households.

    According to the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council, Pakistan has produced about 200,000 doctors since 1947, half of them being women.

    Currently, 104,974 women doctors live in Pakistan of whom 68,209 (65 per cent) are working at private and state-owned medical centres.
    15,619 (14.9 per cent) are jobless, while 21,146 (20.1 per cent) are out of the labour force.

    Meanwhile, more than 36,000 women doctors are either unemployed or have chosen not to work.

    Additionally, as per Bureau of Emigration, since 1970, about 30,000 doctors have left Pakistan, and 1,000 on average will leave every year. Most of them obtained subsidised education from public universities.

    The report further highlights that an average private medical university charges more than Rs5 million whereas the government provides the same education for less than Rs1 million. This indicates that taxpayers’ money goes in vain because one in three of the women doctors do not work.

    To be precise, Rs200 billion is spent on around 50,000 women doctors that goes wasted.

    The survey found that about 28 percent of medical graduates live in rural areas and 72 per cent in urban areas.

    In rural regions, 52 percent Pakistan’s medical graduates are employed and 31 percent are not. Lesser people (i.e. 17 percent) in the rural areas opt to remain out of the labour force in comparison to the national average of 20 percent.

    On the other hand, 70 per cent of the graduates are employed in the urban area, while less than 9 per cent are unemployed. Here, more than 21 per cent of the medical graduates choose to remain out of the labour force.

    78 per cent women in the urban areas have employment opportunities while in rural areas it is as low as 22 per cent.

    Nonetheless, joblessness in rural areas is higher in rural areas at 57 per cent and 43 per cent in the urban centres.

    Out of the 21,146 women medical graduates who preferred to remain out of the labour force, “their share in cities stands much higher at 76.6 per cent compared to their 23.4 per cent share in rural areas”. And about 76 per cent were married.

    54 per cent of the women medical graduates fall in the age bracket of 25-34 years.

  • Pakistani doctor jailed in US for attempting to aid ISIS

    Pakistani doctor jailed in US for attempting to aid ISIS

    Muhammad Masood, a 31-year-old licensed Pakistani doctor living in the United States on a work visa, has been sentenced to 18 years in jail for attempting to provide material support to terrorist organisation ISIS, according to court documents.

    “A Rochester man was sentenced today to 216 months in prison, equivalent to 18 years, followed by five years of supervised release for attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization,” a press release issued by the US Department of Justice stated.

    The court documents revealed that Masood was previously employed as a research coordinator at a medical clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, under an H-1B visa.

    As per the official statement, Masood’s activity from January 2020 to March 2020 depicted his attempts to become a part of the militant outfit and provide material support in carrying out terrorist acts in the US.

    “Between January 2020 and March 2020, Masood used an encrypted messaging application to facilitate his travel overseas to join a terrorist organization,” the statement added.

    It further stated that the Pakistani man made multiple statements about his desire to join ISIS and also pledged his allegiance to the designated terrorist organisation and its leader.

    “Masood also expressed his desire to conduct ‘lone wolf’ terrorist attacks in the United States.”

    On February 21, 2020, he bought a plane ticket from Chicago, Illinois, to Amman, Jordan, with plans to travel to Syria from there.
    However, his travel plans changed on March 16, 2020, as the borders were closed by Jordan under coronavirus travel restrictions.

    He then decided to fly from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, where he would meet a person who he believed would help him with travel via a cargo ship to deliver him to the territory claimed by ISIS.

    On March 19, 2020, Masood traveled from Rochester to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) to board a flight bound for Los Angeles, California.

    However, he was eventually arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) upon arrival at the airport.

    Masood pleaded guilty last year on August 16 to attempting to provide material support to Daesh.
    Senior Judge Paul A. Magnuson sentenced him to 18 years in prison on Friday, after the completion of investigations by the FBI’s JTTF.

  • Doctors in Faisalabad perform incorrect surgeries on two patients with similar names

    In a case of alleged criminal negligence by doctors at a private hospital in Faisalabad, two women underwent incorrect surgical procedures due to mistaken identity, ARY has reported.

    As per details, Parveen Kausar from Ghulam Muhammadabad, was mistakenly scheduled for gallbladder surgery instead of the knee surgery she had scheduled.

    The other woman named Kausar Parveen from Chak 58, Faisalabad, underwent a knee procedure instead of the gallbladder surgery she needed.

    The families of the affected women have approached the police, seeking assistance and requesting an investigation into the matter.

  • US first lady is in ‘good spirits’ after surgery to remove cancerous lesions

    US first lady is in ‘good spirits’ after surgery to remove cancerous lesions

    Jill Biden, the First Lady of the United States of America, has successfully undergone surgery to remove cancerous skin lesions on her face and chest on Wednesday. A third lesion was removed from her left eyelid and sent for examination.

    The lesions, removed via Mohr’s surgery, were consistent with basal cell carcinoma, a form of cancer that does not metastasize. Jill Biden’s doctors have said they were able to get clean margins.

    A White House physician said that “all cancerous tissue was removed.”

    According to Jill’s spokesperson, Vanessa Valdivia, the first lady is “doing well and in good spirits.”

    The 71-year-old first lady was accompanied by her husband President Joe Biden, who spent more than eight hours with her at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

    Biden himself has had several non-melanoma skin cancers in the past.

    Basal cell carcinoma is the most frequently occurring form of all cancers. They are slow-growing, curable and cause minimal damage if treated early.

  • Maulana Tariq Jamil is stable now: Doctors

    Maulana Tariq Jamil is stable now: Doctors

    Religious Scholar Maulana Tariq Jamil was shifted to a hospital in Canada after suffering a heart attack on Tuesday.

    The doctor has confirmed that Maulana Tariq Jamil is out of danger and has been shifted to Critical Care Unit (CCU).

    His son, Yousaf Jamil yesterday in a tweet said that father is in better condition now.

    He also requested for prayers.

    Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi has prayed for the early recovery of famous religious scholar Maulana Tariq Jamil.