Daily Times

Medical profession focusses on acquiring knowledge, skills, and experience for serving the human beings who are physically and mentally ill. The conventional systems in hospitals are devised for the purpose of providing an environment where patients aregetting cure to their diseases through medicine, physiotherapy, and care. Ultimately, they recover with efforts, support and care provided by doctors, nurses,and other staff of the hospital.

During current Covid-19 wave, most of the elderly patients are admitted in the hospital with hope that care and cure will work and resultantly they will recover. It is observed that from gatekeeper of the ward to specialist in the ward generally hate patient rather to the disease. Sometimes, they don’t realize that patients who are diagnosed with Covid-19 have different psychological states and assumptions about their treatment. Patients immediately develop fear about the disease, which is itself major cause of other complications.

It is felt that our health system which already struggling due to various reasons- is further getting bureaucratic in the name of Covid-19 SoPs. The concerns of patients and their attendants are not heard. The media and other stakeholders are influencing behavior of health system and resultantly treatment options for doctors as well as serving patterns of nurses and other staff keep on changing. Patients admitted in Covid-19 wards are more attention seekers as isolation is pushing them into negative zone. Further, their dear and near ones are not able to ask them whether they have taken breakfast, lunch or dinner in timely manner. There are extremely limited communication facilities available for patient and attendants. The staff in these wards usually avoids frequent visit to the patients due to risk of getting virus. Their SOPs allow them to attend these patients for medication, meals or any other emergency only. For the rest of the time patients must wait, if they need water or have any other urgency.

The lack of coordination at all levels in hospital make situation worse when some drugs are required in urgency and same are not available in the pharmacy of the hospital

The lack of coordination at all levels in hospital make situation worse when some drugs are required in urgency and same are not available in the pharmacy of the hospital. The attendant of the patient is asked to bring these drugs within no time. Then comes suggestions from hospital management to contact this and that person. Mostly, attendants consider this a big favor when they are new to city and markets of the city. The people on the other side know the urgency of the situation and demand higher price for the prescribed medicines. In such an emotional situation, mostly, people give their hard-earned money to the medicine mafia in a hope to see their patient healthy again. There comes another situation when such expensive medicines are handed over to the hospital i.e. whether these medicines are administrated or sold back to the drug stores. Lot of such stories are in shared by gatekeepers and other staff of the hospital. This is an alarming situation, administration has very little accountability system to check such malpractices, their role remains of minting more money from the patients rather than providing complete care.

The gap between various levels of administration is also visible when doctor recommends some treatment and it goes from ward to main administration for approval and then it is conveyed to the patient’s attendant. The whole chain of command is bureaucratic and non-cooperative, attendants are considered as slaves and orders are passed without hearing them. In such situation change of shifts delays emergency treatment. There may be some mechanism for carrying out emergency treatment without any delay due to approvals or change of shift.

On the other hand, no authentic information about treatment is shared most of the times. Companies take care of their client’s needs like even from passport and other organizations we regularly receive status update about different service requests. In hospital, you will not receive summary of the treatment made during the day or week, what you will receive is verbal assurance that we are doing our best but we cannot assure that everything will be ok.

It is need of the hour that doctors, nurses, and administration of the hospital should have close relationship for better health services. Accountability system at all levels in every service cadre is required. It is unfortunate that our Bank staff is bound to attend the bank till finalization of daily balance report but hospital staff is religiously following their duty hours whether responsibilities assigned to him or her during those duty hours are fulfilled or not. The specialists total working hours are not regulated, and they attend two-three hospitals in a day. Although, these are practices of very few specialists but there is a need to regulate this aspect of medical practice. An analogy is available in the system about supervision of PhD scholars, Higher Education Commission allows only 5 scholars to be supervised by one supervisor. The health regulatory bodies may develop some standards for medical practitioners so that every patient under their treatment get proper attention and they have time to focus on different options of treatment in systematic manner.

The writer is Dy. Director, Higher Education Commission