Pakistan doctors begin two-day nationwide strike, OPDs and private clinics shut as emergency stays open

Pakistan’s doctors nationwide strike begins today, and for the next two days routine medical care across the country is expected to grind to a halt. The Pakistan Medical Association (PMA), together with other doctors’ bodies, has called a two-day countrywide strike for November 1 and 2, during which outpatient departments, private clinics, routine diagnostic services and scheduled surgeries are to remain suspended. Emergency care is exempt: government hospitals will keep their emergency departments running for patients who cannot wait.

What will be closed

The call covers both the public and private sectors. That means routine check-ups in hospital OPDs, appointments at private clinics and ordinary laboratory tests are all likely to be affected, along with operations that had been scheduled in advance. Patients who already have an appointment for a test or a procedure would do well to ring their hospital or clinic first rather than turn up to a locked door. For genuine emergencies — an accident, a heart attack, any life-threatening condition — the emergency ward remains the place to go.

Why doctors are angry

At the heart of the dispute is the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR). Doctors say private clinics are being raided and medical consultations are being forced into a retail-style point-of-sale system, as if a consultation were a sale at a shop counter. Speaking at a press conference at PMA House in Karachi, PMA Centre President Dr Izhar Ahmed Chaudhary put it bluntly: a doctor’s hands are meant to heal, not to be handcuffed, and a clinic is a place of healing, not a supermarket checkout.

The second grievance is about criminal cases. Doctors say that when a patient dies or suffers a complication during treatment, police routinely register cases under murder and culpable homicide provisions — Sections 302 and 322 of the Pakistan Penal Code — without any independent medical board first examining what happened. PMA Centre Secretary General Dr Abdul Ghafoor Shoro told the same press conference that every death weighs on a doctor’s conscience, and branding a complication as murder is, in his words, a monstrous injustice. The bodies are demanding that no legal action proceed without prior evaluation by a certified, independent medical board, that parliament pass the Healthcare Professionals Protection Act without delay, and that doctors be given institutional, legal and physical security at every facility.

How it came to this

The strike did not come out of nowhere. On September 30, doctors held a one-day nationwide shutdown of private OPDs and consultations. Then, on October 11, an All-Pakistan Doctors’ Convention in Gujrat brought hundreds of senior doctors together to press the same demands. PMA Balochistan had already announced a province-wide strike from November 1; the central leadership has now widened that into a countrywide two-day action, backed by the Young Doctors’ Association, the Private Hospital and Clinics Association of Pakistan and the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. PMA Punjab has issued its own circular supporting the November 1–2 closure, and the Young Doctors’ Association in Sindh has appealed to doctors to stand together.

What patients should do

There is no need to panic, but a little checking will save a wasted trip. If your visit is routine — a follow-up, a report, a scheduled test — confirm it by phone first. If it is an emergency, go straight to hospital: emergency, intensive care and other critical services will continue. No formal government response to this latest call had appeared in the reports available at the time of writing. The doctors’ bodies say their next course of action will be decided at a PMA Central Council meeting on November 28.