RESPONSIBLE news reveal inhuman irregularities in health sector. One can of course want to know which public sector is not suffering from negligence and exploitation? The health care facilities in Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) have come under criticism. The report discloses chaos in the management.
A section of doctors and others sell the several health care services, supposed to be free, to the patients at high prices and there is no central authority to stop the malpractices.
Some physicians, officers, nurses and employees claiming influence of the ruling party illegally collect fees from the patients and their relatives for almost all medical services. The situation has remained unchanged for some years and is running under the nose of the hospital administration; even terminal patients do not get spared from the money grabbers. It seems that no central administration runs the public hospitals in the country, rather organised syndicates are free to collect tolls for facilitating “free services”. This disaster for public health care should not go on its current way.
Report said that irregularities from admitting a patient into a ward to dispatching him/her, providing free drugs and diagnostic services or mere collecting sample for diagnosis are subject to toll to the syndicates, though the services are free in principle. Patients or their attendants have to pay Tk 100 to Tk 300 to secure a seat at any ward, Tk 100 to Tk 300 for using trolley, Tk 50 to Tk 100 for transferring patient from one ward to another, Tk 50 to Tk 300 for urgently getting blood test and X-ray reports, Tk 100 to Tk 300 for getting free ambulance services, Tk 100 to Tk 1,000 for releasing neonatal babies alongwith Tk 50 for gate pass mandatorily. In a word, no service is free here though a good range of services is in principal free of cost.
It is a wide allegation that the doctors, nurses and interns hardly attend the work stations in time and even after entering the hospital, without serving patients physicians pass hours after hours with the representatives of different medicine companies. Despite having essential diagnosis apparatus and staffs at the hospital, the physicians refer patients to private clinics and private diagnostic centres for collecting a defined percentage of money. Patients receive free drugs from hospital authority rarely as maximum drugs secretly go on to the black market and the officers concerned sell essentials drugs to the markets. The condition turns worst while some influential ruling party men appoint midwives, domestic helps and brokers to sustain their toll business and for collecting bribes but the authority overlooks the matter.
The DMCH has been promoted to a 2600-bed hospital recently but with the extended facility no new post was created or manpower recruited, thus the vacuum lures immoral people to do business with dying patients and their attendants. While the government cumulatively increases tax rate and net without ensuring constitutional obligation of medical care (Article 15a), the existing medicare services are also deteriorating. All sections of people, except the top layer of the society, usually come to DMCH for health care as the hospital provides all types of medicare to citizens. It is the duty of the state to provide essential medical care free of cost and it needs to cleanse its largest hospital from syndicates, greedy physicians and ruling party thugs who roam the hospital.
