Hostility in hospitals

Aloofness and coolness run high in the public hospitals of Punjab where the ruling party’s prime focus has been on building carpeted roads and dedicated routes of mass transit in Lahore and some other big cities for years. The ruling family – the House of Sharif – runs a commercial medical complex but they prefer foreign medical centers for their own treatment. Taking a cue from their indifference towards public hospitals, doctors and paramedics become hostile towards the patients. 

No doubt, public hospitals are crowded with patients and their worried attendants where overworked doctors and nurses try to cope with painful situations with their occasional smiles and frequent frowns. 

A brazen display of inhospitality was, however, at display in the Raiwind Tehsil Headquarters Hospital where the staff refused to admit a woman, resident of the area, who was writhing in severe labor pains. Her husband was told that the gynecologist was not present. Unavailability of the bed would have been another valid excuse. Her husband, a petty brick kiln laborer, had no much bucks in his small pocket to take her to a nearby private maternity home. As the time was up, the husband with the help of passersby women did the labor work on a pavement on the hospital premises and a newborn baby gave his shriek in the world, ruled by Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif. 

The baby might know once he is grown up that it had all happened at a place, hardly few kilometers from the palatial residential and the commercial medical complexes of the Sharifs.  

The case of the Raiwind woman is among the very few incidents capturing the attention of the media; earlier, a Kasur woman who had died unattended outside the Jinnah Hospital was a big story. The health beat of media houses is most of the time focused on lucrative health authorities, and not the healthcare issues. 

Regardless of the media poor coverage of health care issues, it is an open secret that public hospitals suffer from several issues. Lack of space in hospitals and lack of professionalism among doctors and paramedics are amongst the top issues of the ailing sector. 

The sector has no much room for negligence as it involves human lives.

The government, over the years, has tried to improve the health care system with cosmetics measures. Recently, a motorcycle ambulance fleet was introduced without any piloting. Its fate is not difficult to predict. In 2012, the same chief minister had launched a fleet of mobile health units in south Punjab districts, and within four years, the whole fleet has come to a halt, rusting in yards. The project was also launched without any proper piloting studies. But who cares about the public exchequer which is wasted on the projects arising from the whims of the chief minister? Besides these two projects, the things on the credit of the chief minister are surprise visits to public hospitals, and every visit ends up with the suspension of a few top doctors from the job. After a few months, those doctors are back to the office, and the life goes on.  

The Punjab government, which has done lots of work on roads infrastructure and landscape, should turn to public hospitals. The government has the ability and resources to make hospitals a welcome place where sufficient space and professional staff are available to patients. 

Use the Raiwind road birth an opportunity to bring about one million changes to public hospitals, starting from the very Raiwind hospital.