Editorial
Uniform diagnostic charges in public hospitals
A holistic approach needed to guarantee improved services
THE government's initiative to introduce uniform charges for all diagnostic and imaging tests in public hospitals is commendable, as it will at least ensure that patients won't have to pay amounts of money arbitrarily fixed by any hospital authority. They will also be in a position to know in advance how much a particular test will cost. But given the heap of anomalies and irregularities that has accumulated over the years in the hospitals, it seems the government will have to go far beyond fixing such charges to ensure service delivery. A piecemeal approach is clearly not enough here.
That the charges for different tests have never been uniform in the government-run hospitals is itself a reflection of basic policy guidelines lacking in these institutions. Poor patients find themselves at the mercy of middlemen in hospitals, and uniform charges may help them a bit. But so long as the nexus between hospital employees and brokers is not broken, innocent patients might fall in traps laid out by them. Besides, there ought to be a quality assurance as far as the diagnostic tests go. The hospitals may have the equipment for tests but lack of trained technical personnel is still a major problem in the health sector as a whole. Similarly, health and hygiene standards are abysmally low in our hospitals.
The decision makers have to take into account the truth that the vast majority of people have to rely on the medicare services rendered by the public hospitals. A huge number of patients admitted in such hospitals are poor and they can ill afford to undergo costly treatment. They are supposed to get medicines free of cost from the public hospitals, which in reality they are mostly deprived of. This is an issue that the health authorities ought to address in right earnest.
Public hospitals are supposed to serve the people with a sense of commitment and avoid any kind of activities, or profit making, which may run counter to the very concept of helping the people in distress. In fact, hospital management is a specialised subject which has never been treated as such in our context. Better hospital management is the crying need of the hour.
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