Healthy Signs

People’s hope for better health services punched with an altercation with the chief minister led to the suspension of the director of Bangur Institute of Neurosciences and Psychiatry yesterday. This is a superficial fact. What lies beneath is an ICU-ridden management in government hospitals with little facilities for the masses. Here, valuable equipment are hardly used and commissioned ones rendered defunct within weeks. The hospitals would come up with several excuses like shortage of staff, absence of trained staff in the respective departments among other reasons like frequent power cuts.

In November 2006, i had an almost similar experience at R G Kar, one of the premier medical college hospitals in Kolkata. From my friend, who was a junior doctor at the hospital then, i came to know that several ultra-modern gadgets had recently been purchased for the cardiology department of the hospital where people throng for angiogram followed by angioplasty very often. What i was surprised to know was technical staff, maybe some doctors also, were not completely trained to operate the equipment? Then, how can i depend on them for the surgery of my father, who had suffered a heart attack? No question of saving money, as it was my father’s life that had to be saved at any cost. What we did was to take him to RTIICS, a private hospital of repute set up by its more famous doctor, Devi Shetty.

Not everyone like me can think that way with the primary hindrance being money. Since childhood, my generation has grown up with the idea that the Left Front government was indeed for the poor. Yes, our family is not poor in the scale of socio-economic factors. But what about others? Can’t they expect better health service at government hospital? In early 1988, i stepped into SSKM Hospital with my parents for my surgery of tonsillitis, which was termed “septic” and called for an immediate operation. Of course that surgery didn’t happen because junior doctors went on strike the day i was supposed to be admitted and the senior surgeon didn’t want to take any “risk” for the follow-up treatment. From now-closed jute mills to hospitals, strike became the most prevailing term in the ’80s and ’90s forcing the people to think for an alternative. While youngsters migrated to other states for jobs, south India-bound trains were running over-burdened with patients.

Again, that was not the situation just a few decades ago when my grandfather had undergone a prostrate surgery at Calcutta Medical College, grandmother got fair attention of doctors at PG Hospital (now SSKM) when she had liver cirrhosis and my maternal grandfather had a pacemaker installed at PG, too. But all these were in 1970s. Why hadn’t the picture changed much in terms of addition of beds, departments, staff and doctors in these hospitals that can cater to patients from all social classes?

We don’t seek an answer from any political party, or ministers. It’s better we get the results sooner than later. When the chief minister — the most powerful democratically elected person in any Indian state — has started surprise visits to hospitals, i hope nobody like me would be turned away from the doors of a government hospital anymore.