A slightly unexplained list of 129 Doctors blacklist has been put up on the Medical Council of India website, with Maharashtra taking Gold with 43 doctors and Rajasthan a far second spot with 16 doctors.  What remains hazy is that the information exists without any details on why their licenses were suspended.

This list follows a long standing public demand of health activists to have a publicly available list giving names and details of Doctors against whom action has been taken by the Council.  ‘List of Presently Blacklisted Doctors’ is given below the Indian Medical Register List on the website, but it seems to be arbitrary as there exists no explanation on how the list was arrived at or how or why names may be taken off.

As per media reports, the President of the Council, Dr. Jayshree Mehta did not have any response to queries on the compilation of the list, the arbitrariness of the procedure or the skew in the list which shows high number of Doctors as blacklisted in only few states (Maharashtra – 43; Rajasthan – 16; Haryana/Tamil Nadu/Uttar Pradesh/Andhra Pradesh – 7 each; Hyderabad/Chhattisgarh/Karnataka/West Bengal – 6 each and 18 Doctors in other states).

As per Dr. MC Gupta, who is also a lawyer, “You cannot check the reason or the suspension procedure as the minutes of the ethics committee meetings, in which disciplinary action against doctors is decided, has not been put up.  Just as MCI maintains the Indian Medical Register with data of Doctors registered in all the state medical councils, they ought to maintain a consolidated Blacklist of Doctors against whom action has been taken by various state medical councils.  In the current form, the list if of little use to the public.”

In the US, for instancem it is easy to find out which Doctor has been punished and how many times, pointed out Dr Gupta, adding that a similar list ought to be available to the public in India too.