THE New Nation reported on Monday that RAB and Mobile Courts have arrested and sentenced 16 brokers to different terms from in front of the Pongu Hospital in the city. They make their presence in the hospital premises on daily basis to lure patients attempting to take admission in the hospital to other clinics and private hospitals with promise of better treatment at cheaper rates. They work on payment of commission from private clinics.
National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedic Rehabilitation (NITOR), known as Pongu Hospital provides treatment to patients who come with fatal accidents. The drive of the law enforcers will ease the plight of patients who often come to Pongu Hospital for life saving emergency treatment. It will also ring alert signals to other brokers at other public hospitals in the city and all over the country.
The condition of most public hospitals across the country is quite poor. Apart from shortage of logistics, the hospitals are plagued with mismanagement, which has in some cases given rise to a parallel management of lower level employees and brokers to jointly mislead patients. They silently convince patients to move out to private clinics or diagnostic centers. In case they want admission to the public hospitals these brokers arrange hospital beds or cabins against payment. They also charge for foods and other services.
It is surprising that even after media reports on many occasions they were relentlessly exploiting patients taking advantage of silence of the hospital managements. Despite some arrests and punishment from Pongu Hospital, their presence at other city hospitals and in the districts will remain the biggest challenge to poor patients coming for treatment. We believe that law enforcers and Mobile Courts will expand their drives at those places while the Health Ministry must take stringent steps to make sure that brokers are not allowed at hospital premises.
Experts say that the Health Ministry and hospital authorities are invariably responsible for the plight of the poor patients who come to public hospitals for treatments at low cost. Brokers eventually mislead them to private facilities. Even the biggest public hospital in the city- DMCH is not free from such exploitation.
About a thousand patients visit the outdoor department of the 1,700-bed DMCH and at least 400 get admitted. Most such admission cases are taken care by brokers who manage seats, medicines and blood and often contaminated blood to patients. DMCH study shows about 31 percent outdoor patients take assistance of middlemen for appointment with doctors, admission, diagnosis, operations and beds.
The problem is that the hospital management is allowing brokers because they move patients to clinics and hospitals in which doctors work as private practitioners. Such illegal and immoral actions of hospital managements must end to end the exploitation of patients by brokers.
