Chennai: Doctors can thrive without hospitals, whereas a hospital can never exist without doctors rendering their services. Therefore, by no means can a hospital treat a doctor like a workman in a factory, a technical person, or a regular employee, Madras high court said.
Justice N Anand Venkatesh made the observations on Monday, while dismissing an arbitration plea moved by MIOT Hospitals against Dr Balaraman Palaniappan, a cardiothoracic surgeon. The court also imposed a cost of 1 lakh on the hospital, payable to the doctor.
MIOT moved the arbitration proceeding, claiming breach of a professional contract by the doctor and joining another private hospital, its competitor in the city, in violation of confidentiality, non-solicitation, and non-compete covenants in the contract.
The court dismissed the plea since it came to light that the doctor terminated the agreement after giving due notice, as agreed under the contract. “An agreement made with a doctor by a hospital, which contains a non-solicitation and non-compete clause, is certainly opposed to public policy, and such an agreement must be held to be unlawful, unenforceable, and void ab initio to that extent,” the court said.
“It is quite unfortunate that a hospital incorporated such a clause in an agreement with a doctor. Either it is a result of cut, copy, and paste syndrome from an agreement which is regularly entered into between technology companies and their employees, or the petitioner hospital forgot the fact that they are running a hospital to serve the patients and that they are indirectly admitting that the organization is nothing short of a profit-making entity like any other business,” the court said.
“A doctor is an independent professional, who cannot be stopped from rendering services wherever they want to and cannot be stopped from attending to patients just because those patients were earlier taking treatment in the petitioner hospital,” the court added.>
