State Prevention of Violence against doctors acts of India- A comparative and descriptive analysis

Background Various studies have showed varying incidence of violence against doctors, ranging from 48% upto 80% To deter the physical attacks against doctors, different Indian states have individually enacted the ‘Violence prevention Acts (VPA). After protests by doctors, a national VPA draft bill was made. Hypothesis- The state VPA acts will be different on amount of punishment and other parameters from each other. We aim to highlight differences between various state VPAs on qualitative and quantitative grounds. Methods : A descriptive retrospective analysis was undertaken over 8 weeks VPA acts were downloaded from India Code website by entering key words like ‘Violence’, ‘prevention of violence’, ‘doctors’ . The Indian Ministry of Health website was used to download the draft national bill. Data was entered and analysed using SPSS. Mean with SD and median was used to represent quantitative data. Percentage was used to represent qualitative data. Results Twenty three different states have enacted prevention of violence acts. On an average, the act awarded 3.3 years of imprisonment (SD= 1.54). Ten years was the maximum time any state (Tamil Nadu) could punish the culprits. The people charged under the act were required to pay INR 50,000 (Median) if the charges against them are proved. Conclusions The Maharashtra state act protected the maximum number of stakeholders. The acts differed with each other on grounds like maximum punishment, types of doctors protected, etc. All acts mention the offense as cognizable and non-bailable. Hence the hypothesis is partially accepted