In Mikhail Bulgakov’s story ‘The steel windpipe’, in a small village one night a young doctor is faced with the choice of doing an emergency operation he had never done before or let a child die. He dares and the child survives. That is fiction but such and much more complex situations occur across the medical world daily where doctors decide to skate on thin ice to reach a destination than not to proceed at all. At times without happy endings.
In an atmosphere of mutual trust and compassion, society for some time accepted that as a fact of life. That trust is now perceived by the laity to have been breached, giving rise to suspicions of 'crimes’ like incompetent and negligent treatment. Growing consumerism in a system of fee for service, where patients expect value for money and feel informed enough to measure outcomes, has aggravated discontent. The state in such a scenario has…
