Helpless patients, crumbling healthcare system reveal a sad nation of second-class citizens

When the Vice Chancellor of KG Medical University in Lucknow, Lt General Dr Bipin Puri (Rtd), received a call from the Uttar Pradesh chief minister’s office about complaints that COVID patients were being left unattended, he decided to see things for himself. He was accompanied by several senior doctors and as word spread that the VC was inspecting the wards, junior doctors and nursing staff rushed in to be present.

Within a few days of the inspection as many as 40 health workers in the medical college hospital including Dr Puri tested positive and were quarantined. Things were bad as it is, recalls a doctor with a sigh, and now there were even fewer healthcare workers to take care of the patients.

The fear of COVID has spread such panic that attendants, nursing staff and doctors are reluctant to put their lives at risk. The shortage of attendants has prompted indiscriminate hiring of untrained people, who accept the assignment because they need the money; but they too prefer to keep their distance and patients are largely left to fend for themselves.

In smaller towns like Damoh in Madhya Pradesh, patients’ relatives have been reported to have looted oxygen cylinders as they arrived at the hospital and carrying them to the bed on which ‘their’ patients lay. Doctors on duty have been left to deal with irate people, the media and political and administrative bosses, who are content to seek explanations over the phone and bark orders.

Half the patients in hospitals are those who do not need to be there, says a doctor in Delhi. They have got themselves admitted at the first sign of infection, he claimed, because they can afford it and also because they do not want to put their families to risk. The other half, he adds, comprise patients who were suffering from one comorbidity or the other and also tested positive. ‘Since when did we get ourselves hospitalized because we had fever, a cold or a sore throat,” he asks, insisting that the failure of the authorities to stop panic attacks, shortages and clarity about protocols has led to the crisis.

The panic indeed is such that a retired doctor recalls receiving a call from a former colleague. She wanted to know if I could help her secure hospital beds for her children, the doctor related. But no, her children were fine, the lady doctor informed, but she was worried that in case she needed to put her children into hospital, how would she secure beds.

We seem to have created a nation of second-class citizens, rued a retired bureaucrat. The first-class citizens have access to money, power and strings. You need to be well connected and networked to get a hospital bed, an oxygen cylinder, life-saving drugs or injection or even an ambulance when you need it. If you are a second-class citizen, with no money and no connections to the government or to the politicians, you can pray for a fast and painless death.

Non-Covid patients have been left in the lurch. If anyone has a heart attack at home, doctors agree, he would today find it almost impossible to get admission in hospitals. All hospitals have been turned into COVID hospitals and without a COVID positive test report, patients are being turned away. Well, what about non-COVID patients? Don’t they have a right to live and to decent medical treatment?

There is no clarity on how COVID tests are to be done. Should suspected COVID patients reach the already crowded testing labs and hospitals for the tests? Or is it advisable for them to stay at home and give samples for testing to a visiting technician? While there is no clarity about the official position, labs in several parts of Delhi stopped collecting samples from home. Upar Se Order Hai (these are orders from above), the labs have maintained with people unable to confirm if this is indeed so.

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How do dead bodies spread the virus, I asked a doctor. They don’t, she replied promptly.

Why then are family members not being allowed to see the body of COVID patients, I asked, aghast. She explained that initially there was a lot of confusion whether the virus could spread by touching a contaminated surface. It has now been established that the virus is spread through droplets exhaled from the mouth or the nose. Since dead bodies cannot breathe, he said with a chuckle, they can neither infect others nor get infected by others.

By denying permission to bring the dead body home, isn’t the protocol doing more harm than good, I asked. Besides the psychological trauma, consider the expenses incurred by the State to cremate the dead bodies and the man hours lost, I pointed out. The doctor replied that even if the rule is withdrawn now, nobody would want to take the dead bodies home out of sheer fear. And if they do, they might not only be ostracized by the neighbours but they might also get lynched, she warned.

Reason and science have clearly taken a back seat.

Views are personal