Mumbai: The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has demanded insurance of Rs 50 lakh for private doctors who are treating Covid-19 patients at their clinics or hospitals. This comes after 45 private doctors, mostly the general practitioners, in Maharashtra died while providing medical services to Covid patients in their private clinics or hospitals.
Earlier, the Maharashtra government has announced insurance of Rs 50 lakh for government employees, health workers, police and journalists. The scheme is also applied to the private doctors serving at Covid hospitals as per the government notice. Thousands of private doctors in Maharashtra have responded to the government's call and continued their private medical services. But this scheme does not apply to these doctors in private clinics or hospitals.
There are around 70,000 private doctors of all the medical fraternities (allopath, AYUSH and dentistry) in all over Maharashtra who need to be covered under this insurance. For such doctors, IMA insisted on an insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh from March 2020 like government medical employees.
According to the IMA, 230 doctors practising allopathy have succumbed to Covid-19 across India till now. Of them, 45 are from Maharashtra. While IMA has recorded Covid-19 infections in over a 1,000 of its members across the country, 450 of them are from Maharashtra. However, the actual count of infected homeopathy, ayurvedic, and allopathy doctors may be much higher.
IMA state unit joint secretary Dr Santosh Kadam said private practitioners treating coronavirus patients ran the same risk as government doctors. “Hence, private doctors should also get the same benefits and life cover as the government doctors. We are ready to pay the premium. Our demand is to extend the term insurance policy to private doctors also, just like the government doctors,” said Dr Avinash Bhondwe, president of IMA, Maharashtra.
Dr Bhondwe said many times they have received verbal consent from the minister regarding insurance schemes for private doctors. Following which they have requested to approve this demand immediately and issue such an ordinance. “The list of eligible doctors for this will be officially given by IMA Maharashtra. Full cooperation will also be extended to comply with other legal matters in this regard,” he said.
Health experts have welcomed this move of IMA stating a doctor or a health worker does not know whether they are near a Covid-19 positive patient or not. “Even a doctor sitting in a clinic is rendering service in this pandemic. How can he ensure the person coming for treatment is infected with coronavirus or not. What if he gets infected and dies?” he asked.
