Daily Times

As if the news of the shooting of a transgender wasn’t appalling enough, the agony was piled on by the treatment meted to her at the emergency ward of a state-run hospital. Going by news stories, doctors didn’t give her urgent treatment because they could not decide whether to register her in the male or female ward. They put her near a toilet where she succumbed to her wounds. Now they would try and get away with it, if they haven’t already, saying that registering patients according to gender is a necessary technical requirement. Who in their right mind would have objected to a bleeding human being registered in the wrong ward? Alisha deserved much better. It can’t be said with certainty that she would have survived had she been attended to timely, but this much can be said: most (not all) people at state-run hospitals constitute a callous lot. What happened was a tragedy of epic proportions, but the buck does not stop here. Every unfortunate soul who has to take recourse to a sarkari (state-run) hospital is usually greeted with apathy.

Nothing ill can be said of the medical profession and those practitioners who bring dedication and professionalism to their jobs. There are plenty of medical doctors (MDs) who offer diagnoses, and sometimes even free-of-cost treatment. Some medical practitioners run welfare organisations, free dispensaries for prescription drugs, and occasional medical camps even in far-flung areas of the country. Kudos to them. The country needs more of their ilk. On the other hand, we have the usual lot at state-run hospitals. At the hospitals that I’ve visited, these people do not even behave decently with the unfortunate common folk whom they are supposed to treat.

Stop with hospitals for just a moment. There is something about the word sarkari that is depressing at the outset. When you are referred to a sarkari office — a lower court, electricity supply department or a bill correction facility — there is an impending sense of doom that makes those first steps heavy and uncertain. If you are not a ranking military or civil service officer, you know you will be insulted, possibly fleeced at these venues. Ranking officers, of course, do not have to visit these places most of the time. They have orderlies to perform petty chores. But if you’re a commoner, and circumstances have pushed you inside a sarkari facility, you will find staffers wearing a look of listless disgust. It isn’t mentioned anywhere but at most costumer-care desks an unspoken convention is followed religiously. Staff will try their best to avoid establishing eye contact with you. They will also use the minimum of audible syllables. If you ask them to repeat something you couldn’t hear, they are going to pretend they are engrossed in something important and urgent, and leave you high and dry. You’d like to think it’s this way at public utility departments, but then you have the sarkari hospital.

Medicine is supposed to be a noble profession in our cultural idiom. Doctors are often looked up to with awe. Epithets like ‘saviour’, ‘life-saver’, etc., are showered on them. So when these people treat patients like they treated Alisha, it invites revulsion. I have been to the emergency wards of the Mayo, Services, Ganga Ram and Sheikh Zayad hospitals of Lahore a number of times. Each visit was worse than the earlier.

Most MDs at sarkari hospitals treat patients like bus conductors treat farers on a bus. Diagnosis is a dull routine affair. Tedium is in the air; it is like a contagious disease that plagues every MD. Maybe it’s because we’ve seen too many episodes of House MD or Gray’s Anatomy, but it seems as if there is no spirit, no passion in staff at sarkari hospitals. Nurses and ward boys are exceptionally rude. What is more troubling is that there are mostly young doctors at emergency wards. You don’t expect young graduates to be apathetic and spiritless. But there is something terribly wrong at Pakistan’s state-run medical facilities. It has dehumanised our MDs. I have seen a doctor take a patient’s pulse while texting on her smartphone. I’ve also observed two doctors making fun of a rustic’s pronunciation as he explained his condition in a different dialect. Hygiene is usually abysmal. Apparently, MDs at these hospitals are instructed never to greet a patient with a smile, sound reassuring, or look interested in their ailment.

Maybe it is the pressure of the work that gets to them. Perhaps it’s the long working hours and the less-than-ideal working conditions. But none of these can account for lack of compassion or professional courtesy at least. But here is the saddest part and it applies to most MDs. Visit a doctor at the Mayo Hospital in the morning. Observe how they behave with you. Then go see the same doctor at their private clinic in the evening. You will meet two different persons. The MD who didn’t even care to look at you at Mayo Hospital will transform into an Emirates Airlines flight attendant at his private clinic. Doctors who advertise their Mayo or Ganga Ram Hospital credentials on name plates and hoardings conveniently forget it is because of Mayo and Ganga Ram Hospital that so many are attracted to their private clinics.

Sure, statistically speaking, a great number of patients do get treatment at sarkari facilities. A majority of these people also recover from their ailments. But that is mainly due to the sheer number of patients that visit government-run facilities. There are dozens of surgeries performed every day, medicines doled out and diagnoses given. The sarkari hospital works like a little-oiled machine. If 400 patients may walk in daily, 300 walk out the same day with a prescription. The numbers can be paraded to show the system works, and that the overworked MDs are doing more than they can. But that’s where the statistics hide the very obvious: they are doing a whole lot less than they should.

The writer is a lecturer in English literature at Government College University, Lahore. He can be reached at sameeropinion@gmail.com