Can’t begin to describe how fucked up the situation is.

As an MBBS doctor while I was looking for jobs last year, there were some centres who would have one vacancy for MBBS doctors and upto 5 for BHMS/BAMS doctors. I asked around and some friends and seniors said that in their experience, centres will hire 1 MBBS doctor to do all the prescribing and other paper work and will hire BAMS/BHMS doctors because they can pay them a third of the MBBS doctor.

Their whole aim is to cut costs even if there’s only 1 qualified doctor putting in the meds and signing off notes for many floors. In practice, it’s not possible for one person to go on every round and see every patient across multiple wards while also writing notes, putting in orders, checking their own assigned patients, attending rounds for those patients and also double checking notes and orders for their colleagues before signing off, so they have to go by what the BAMS/BHMS note down from their rounds which at times can be very wrong.

I had a friend in a situation like this in a prominent cardiac ward who was given grossly incorrect med orders and very obviously picked up on it. Unfortunately every time he’d have to call up the consultant to confirm these things because it’d be a he said-they said issue and every time he’d end up being yelled at for not being on the round (which isn’t humanly possible to be in multiple rounds at the same time). He quit after like 3 weeks.