Attitudes 4

When I became a head of my department, I decided to change a number of things for better. One of them was to teach the resident doctors. The postgraduate teaching program was practically nonexistent. There used to be four clinical meetings a month – maternal mortality audit, perinatal mortality audit, journal club and seminar. The seminar used to be more interesting than others, but not up to the mark. There was no didactic or small group teaching on a regular basis. In a questionnaire I circulated amongst them, I included some questions on their needs of education, and found out that they could not attend lectures before 4 o’clock, which was the official end of working day for the staff members. So I proposed that we teach them between 4 and 5 P.M. Working for 1 extra hour once in 16 weeks was not asking for too much, especially when we had to stay back for emergencies not infrequently. There was a group of 4 staff members, three of them professors and one associate professor, all of them junior to me by position but two of them much older than me, who used to resist every good proposal from me, and would go to the Dean or someone who had access to the Dean’s ear (figuratively) and crib about it. All of them refused to teach between 4 and 5 P.M. Two things were wrong with this refusal. We as medical teachers were expected to make all possible efforts for better education of the students. This refusal was against that principle. The other thing that was wrong was that three of them were active members of local obstetric gynecological society, which was a member body of the national obstetric gynecological society. They would participate in educational activities of the society after office hours and even on Sundays and holidays. They would accept these assignments with smiles on their faces and respectful words when their senior office bearers asked them to do that work. I had actually witnessed this polite behavior. When I asked them about this double standard, one of them told me that that was their personal interest. The education part was not the interest, the need to keep climbing the political ladder to the post of president of the society was. Nothing lasts for ever, including bad things. Over the next 6 years three of them left. One of them got transferred to another institute because the Dean started asking for too much effort from that person, after 4 P.M., at night, and even on Sundays and public holidays. Another person left because she always wanted a better paying job in a private hospital, and had been trying to find one for years. Third one left similarly for a job in a corporate hospital. The associate professor continued. When I decided to revamp the postgraduate teaching program again, I proposed this time slot again. The associate professor alone said she did not want to teach at that time, because she was against teaching the residents between 4 and 5 P.M. in principle. Boy, I have such principled persons to deal with. What I do about this situation is for a future posting on this blog.