‘Gohorment’ Hospitals!

All observations. Firsthand. Flashes. Cracks. Bits. Pieces. Not objective proofs, though. Nor measurable variables. Nor scalable inefficiencies. Our government hospitals suck on many fronts, that’s the long and short of it. Period. No imprisoning me for the crime of highlighting what I often feel deeply. No succumbing to another lowly conduct. Listen. With impatient ears.

Emergency, especially at SKIMS. The first and foremost. Respectfully concurred-most doctors are helpful. Even if they’re not, it’s an emergency. Frequent burnouts are a given. So where lies the elephant? Cramped Triage. With two to three doctors. Catering to patients with terminal injuries, moribund hearts, or deathly suffocation. The healer attends to patients, but when patients come in swathes, the conclusion is known. On top of each other. Waiting for when that second patient is done with the doctor so that another can push through.

The triage at times feels like a close-up scene of free rice being distributed at some shrine. Wheelchair-ridden patients. Patients resting their head on the shoulders of their attendants while walking in. A few fixed to gurneys, waiting for death. Most desolated and bereft.

For goodness’ sake, how can three or four doctors treat such patients with such high morbidity in a tiny room where injections are also given by nurses-and other resuscitating techniques are performed by the same doctors, to boot? What’s stopping us from at least shifting the triage elsewhere and maybe adding a couple more doctors? It’s not tough to make quick, disproportionate calculations, and cogitate.

Shift focus, and the parallels stick out ugly. Nurses vanishing from the emergency room (not triage). Dry your throat, folks, as much as you can. And then, minutes later, all of a sudden, they pop up, as if dropping from heaven.

Another tragedy? A handful of them, catering to dozens upon dozens of patients: breaking open injections vials, mixing them into the NS. In a matter of seconds. An intensified to-do. Can you imagine the overload? Patient agony? Staff burnout? The grave sin of not recognizing this (and resolving it)-by whom it may concern?

Pressure is immensely high. Everyone with any sense should agree with that. Not everyone’s cup of tea. Not mine. When patient care is empathetically warranted, most of them succeed. Not all of them, though. This hurts!

I should know; I have spent the last three years wandering through corridors of the hospital. Keenly observing it. Understanding it. Comparing it with costly private hospitals. And resting my head on my hands, as a result.

Add to the chasm the repulsive language of an assistant in the endoscopy-colonoscopy wing in a certain government hospital. Just imagine what I falter to scrawl here. No manners. No moral scruples. No guilt. No attempt to imagine oneself in the patient’s place-to understand their anxieties, worries, premonitions, trepidations, & deathly vibes.

Poor people visit government hospitals. Poor, innocent people. Those who can’t (or aren’t willing to) go to private healthcare institutions. Why add to their woes by establishing a medical store linked with PM-JAY half a kilometer away at SKIMS? Why exhaust the last remnants of their energy by making their legs scream in agony? In frustration?

I have seen attendants jump in commotion. Pestering doctors. Acting as if head over heels with the staff members when in front of them and then cursing the same behind the scenes. This is not hypocrisy. It’s a frustration-systematically driven. Organically induced. Behaviourally brought about.

Grievance redressal mechanisms are opaque. Where will an agonized, uneducated, tormented patient or their attendant go? Who shall accompany them in all the hustle and bustle? Hmm?

Result? Such avoidable suffering lies buried. This is what we, as a civilization, fail to notice.

Space. Respect. Flexibility. That’s what’s needed.

Postscript:

Ask me. Interrogate me. I shall be there. In truth. In God’s name. What I lack, however, are objective proofs to satisfy you, to establish the concrete form of the suffering experienced by patients and attendants at times. That’s my tragedy. A painful one.

Our government hospitals are abundant. Indeed. Thank God for it! Otherwise, it could have been an impossible mission! Yet, where abundance should be, scarcity is.

And it pains & pinches. Badly.