Support System

The government needs to strengthen public health care, which is overburdened, emotivated and short of funds

- Namita Kohli

At around 2pm on a late March afternoon in Jhansi, Dr Harish Chandra Arya, chief medical superintendent at the Maharani Laxmibai Medical College, entered his office and settled in his chair, hoping to catch a break after a busy morning. That's when his mobile phone rang.

Dr Sadhna Kaushik, the principal of the college, had called to alert Arya about the arrival of a “team from Kanpur”. The officials from Kanpur, she said, would be inspecting the conditions at the hospital's emergency and trauma care centre, and the staff needed to get its act together.

Since March 10, the emergency and trauma centre at the hospital had been in the eye of a raging controversy over the case of a man whose amputated leg was placed under his head as a pillow. The administration, in a typical response, suspended two doctors and nurses, replaced the principal and handed out a compensation of 02 lakh to the patient.

“Get the place cleaned up,” Arya ordered his staff as soon as he hung up. He checked the CCTV footage (from the entrance of the college) playing on his desktop screen, before getting up to leave to attend to the team.

As hospital employees, particularly doctors, grapple with a “sensitive situation”—faced with relentless media attention and pressure from the administration—some say the “high workload and staff shortages” in the 30-bed emergency and trauma care centre create conditions for such incidents to take place. “The load is so high sometimes that we have to treat patients on the floor,” said Arya.

The situation is no different across other tertiary care centres in Uttar Pradesh. At Gorakhpur's BRD Medical College and Hospital, for instance, during the season of acute encephalitis syndrome, up to 600 patients from surrounding areas daily end up competing for the 228 beds earmarked for treatment of the disease in the hospital.