Editorial
Clamping fees on DMCH visitors a bad idea
Go back to enforcing visiting hour rules
THERE is little question that the number of people visiting patients at Dhaka Medical College Hospital every day is rather high and that the hospital authorities have a hard time dealing with them while attending to the sick. But that can hardly be a reason for the authorities to clamp fees on those intending to visit patients, something which seems to have been done. The DMCH has apparently made it a rule since the first day of this month that visitors will have to pay three types of fees, depending on which part of the hospital their relatives or friends are being treated in, if they mean to be let into the hospital premises. Now, quite a few points come up here. The first is that the DMCH offers free medical facilities to patients, which in turn means that the poor and not so well off find it a convenient place for treatment. And the second is that the relatives of those admitted to the hospital are themselves poor and cannot afford to pay the fees the hospital authorities now say they must.
The DMCH management of course thinks that clamping fees on visitors will lead to crowd control. That may turn out to be a misplaced idea. That is because charging fees from visitors could well turn out to be a business, so much so that it could well become a habit on the part of those collecting them and in time might lead to corruption of a new kind. Then comes the question of those unable to cough up the fees and yet needing to be with their ill family members. As reports indicate, where 200 hundred nurses should be on duty in a given shift in the hospital, as many as fifty per cent of them remain on leave every day on some ground or the other. Add to that the fact that the DMCH is one hospital where the rush of patients is higher than at any other hospital. That being the situation, it is absolutely unacceptable that a hundred nurses or so will remain away from their duties and thereby worsen conditions for patients. It is owing to such abnormal conditions that the relatives of the ailing are constrained to be at their bedside, a point the hospital authorities must not ignore.
Where discouraging the flow of visitors to patients is the issue, there is a simple and time-tested rule the DMCH can follow: it can strictly enforce visiting hours and allow no one in outside those hours. That way, it is possible that discipline will return to the hospital. But with that must come a guarantee that hospital staff will be on standby at all hours of the day and night to attend to patients and not give reason to families to argue that they need to be at the bedside of the ailing.
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