Good morning. Two hospitals are running emergency services only this morning. Before you decide the Jodhpur demand list is radical, read it: a twelve-hour cap, a lunch room, Saturdays kept for teaching. We open there, on day three.
— DR. ADITYA SETH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
01 · THE LEAD
DOCTORS
The demand list now runs to eleven points. One of them is a lunch room.
Day three at AIIMS Jodhpur. Routine OPD and elective surgery are still shut. Emergency OPD, emergency theatres, ICU, labour room and blood bank are running, and the residents put that in writing before anyone asked them to.
Dr Rajnaresh Yadav, a junior resident in anaesthesiology, died on duty on 22 September. Police suspect suicide. No note has been recovered and the post-mortem is awaited, so the cause of death is not established.
Two documents have landed since. On 24 September the RDA filed an eleven-point representation, copied to the Union Health Minister and the National Medical Commission. On 25 September FORDA wrote to the Executive Director backing it and adding seven asks of its own.
Look at what is actually on the list:
Duty hours capped at 12 hours, with mandatory rest after
Elective OT from 9 AM to 4 PM, Monday to Friday. No elective cases in the emergency OTs. Saturdays kept as academic days.
A cap on OPD numbers per department, fixed OPD timings, a lunch hour and a designated lunch room
A leave policy that is online, uniform, and does not refuse a resident who is sick
Dedicated parking near Emergency, OPD and IPD
The primary three have not moved: a public apology, compensation for the family, and the Executive Director’s resignation. FORDA restated the third as accountability at the highest level of the administration, and asked for a time-bound independent inquiry with residents sitting on it.
What has come back from Executive Director Dr Goverdhan Dutt Puri is condolences and two committees: an internal inquiry chaired by the Dean of Academics, and a second one to look at working conditions. Residents have been invited to send it their suggestions, and asked to resume duty.
The candle march reached its third night on Thursday. IMA Junior Doctors Network co-convenor Dr Saransh Verma posted footage of it: “Hundreds of flames, but still zero answers and zero accountability.”
If you or a colleague needs to talk to someone, Tele-MANAS is free, open round the clock and available in multiple languages on 14416.
02 · DOCTORS
The placards said stop VIP culture. The FIR still has the doctor’s name on it.
Residents at AIIMS Nagpur came out on Thursday holding placards that read stop VIP culture, no safety no duty, stop violence against doctors.
The assault was on 22 September, the same morning as the Jodhpur death. A junior resident treating a critically ill patient in the MICU was taken by the collar and punched after the patient died. Four men are named in the FIR under the Maharashtra Medicare Service Persons Act. Nobody has been arrested.
What they want now is a written rule. The RDA has asked the institute to adopt a no special treatment policy, on the stated grounds that patients turn up with letters from politicians, expect privileges, and lean on staff who are in no position to refuse. It has also asked AIIMS Nagpur to lodge the complaint in its own name in cases like this. As things stand, the doctor who was punched had to put his own name on an FIR against the sons of a patient who had just died under his care.
03 · CLINICAL
Nearly half the appendicitis patients who waited three days arrived perforated
45,218 patients, 1,377 hospitals, 112 countries. Perforation climbed from 22.9% to 48.0% with every extra day before a surgeon saw them. The wait inside the hospital, after the examination, added nothing at all.
Check the urine before you pick the second drug
In 75,455 patients on metformin, the renal benefit of GLP-1s and SGLT-2 inhibitors held up where there was albuminuria and vanished where the urine was clean, which was 82% of everybody. In that same clean-urine group, sulfonylureas came out 31% worse than gliptins, in an analysis nobody designed to go looking for it.
04 · MEDICOLEGAL
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MEDICOLEGAL
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An expert panel cleared her. Then somebody read the file.
A tubectomy in 2019. A death 23 days later. An order in 2026 for ₹37.25 lakh, and ₹25 lakh of it comes out of the surgeon personally. The government committee that found no negligence was never shown one line of history: an operation on the same uterus, seven years earlier. The hospital argued it had only supplied the building. It then filed the government’s tubectomy guidelines, handing the bench the exact ruler to measure her against.
Two phone calls, ninety minutes apart, and an FIR for unnatural death.
At 11.28 am she told her son she was fine. At 12.58 pm a doctor from the clinic rang to say something had gone wrong in theatre. Hand liposuction, the sort of small job that gets slotted in between appointments. She died six days later. The family is not alleging the surgery was botched. It says the room had no ventilator for the moment things stopped going to plan, and it wants the case sheets, the anaesthesia records and the CCTV seized while they still exist.
05 · POLICY
A court ordered a termination. The hospital delivered a baby instead.
The Allahabad High Court cleared a 13-year-old survivor to end a pregnancy at 29 weeks and told the hospital to do it the next day. Induction was started in the evening and failed, a caesarean followed, and when the judges asked who had authorised that operation, nobody in the courtroom could answer. The Principal Secretary has two weeks to report in a sealed cover.
06 · QUICK HITS
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