Nurse from Arunachal assaulted in AIIMS
Source: Hueiyen News Service

Imphal, September 13 2014 : In yet another disturbing incident of intimidating the nursing community, the nation's premiere medical institution, AIIMS, reported a serious case of physical assault of a female nurse by visiting relatives of a patient admitted in the hospital's New Emergency Ward.

The incident occurred on Wednesday night at 8:30 p.m.when the female nurse on night duty asked five visitors of a patient named Sunil Kumar to leave the New Emergency Ward as it was against the hospital policy to have more than one relative in the Ward at any given time, said a joint statement of North East Forum for International Solidarity (NEFIS) and Centre for Struggling Women (CSW) .

The release alleged that the female nurse, who is from Arunachal Pradesh, became a victim of aggressive behaviour of two of the patient's female relatives.

Although the nurse maintained polite body language and asked them to calm down and step out of the ward, one of the accused female visitors hit the nurse and left strangulation marks on her throat.

The incident left the AIIMS nurses on duty highly enraged, and they called a spontaneous strike that lasted until the Hauz Khas police filed the FIR, the release stated while pointing out that the nurses' representatives met the Director of AIIMS, who promised to follow up the case with the Police.

As noted by Chinglen Khumukcham of the North East Forum for International Solidarity (NEFIS), many working persons from the North East are very easily made targets of racist comments and assaults.

This is especially so with North East women, like female nurses, etc.

who are considered as 'docile' and 'different', and are therefore easily harassed.

Meanwhile, Maya John of Centre for Struggling Women (CSW) cited that the larger exploitative trend of nurses' working conditions and poor conditions of healthcare was allowing government hospitals to continuously expose their women work force to risks like assaults, sexual harassment, etc.

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