Editorial
Holidays and healthcare deficit
This must be overcome with contingency planning
THE saddest thing that could happen to people is for them to be deprived of public services every time a holiday season comes round. It is a reality which has always been felt keenly during the period around and on Eid. As a report in this newspaper makes clear, innumerable citizens (and they are almost all in the lower income category) suffered during the festival holidays because of an acute absence of doctors and other medical personnel in the hospitals. Given that public services are always a twenty-four hour job, arrangements should have been in place to handle patients during the holidays. Is there any mechanism to ensure this?
A large number of patients crowded Dhaka Medical College Hospital during the just-concluded Eid holidays after they were referred there by the clinics or hospitals they had gone to earlier. Most of these patients hail from Narayanganj, Savar and Gazipur and under ideal conditions should have been provided with treatment at their local medical institutions. That was not possible because doctors and nurses were not available. That medical personnel do require leave or need to be with their families on festive occasions is a fact to be duly acknowledged. However, hospitals and clinics, in the capital as elsewhere, need to have fallback arrangements in place in order for emergencies to be handled. We are sure that such thoughts did not escape the minds of the medical authorities. But when even institutions such as Suhrawardy and Mitford hospitals refer their patients to DMCH on the plea that their anaesthetists and other staff have gone on leave, it is clear that something is seriously wrong with health care in the country.
The picture accompanying our report (in yesterday's issue of this newspaper) says it all: a man, his left foot in bandages, crawls along the floor at the Pongu Hospital in order to help himself because there are no hospital staff around. The shame is not merely that of the hospital. It is also that of society as a whole.
In a country where there are regular complaints about the poor conditions or paucity in health care facilities, it should be the moral responsibility of the hospital authorities that people do not suffer because of negligence. Nothing can be sadder than the sight of seriously ill or badly injured individuals in agony right inside the hospitals owing to an absence of doctors and nurses.
We urge the ministry of health as well as hospital administrations to take these facts into cognizance so that such conditions are rolled back.
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