This paper reported in its recent online edition about a privately run hospital cum diagnostic centre in Bogra. An inpatient mother after successfully delivering an infant and in apparently sound health died from a wrong injection being pushed on her by an attending doctor only after 10 minutes. This place was subsequently vandalized by furious members of her family and others. Indeed such incidents are noted to be not few but reported intermittently in the media reflecting an unchanging pattern. There were reports about a large number of unauthorized clinics and diagnostic centres in the country. For example, one such report stated that there are some 123 functioning clinics in Khulna city out of which only 32 have been officially permitted to function.
According to another report, there are more than 2,000 clinics and diagnostic centres in Dhaka city but the government’s Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) gave license to only 898 to operate. The same situation can be seen existing in other places of the country.
The number of privately run medical colleges in the country is 35. But most of them reportedly are medical colleges in name only. Out of these medical centres of learning and training, 25 were allegedly given operating licenses on political considerations and connections to influential persons under the past administrations. These bodies never fulfilled proper criterion to be considered as fit for producing doctors with requisite knowledge and know-how.
The unauthorized clinics without proper operating chambers, equipment and well-qualified doctors and staff are in no position to discharge proper treatment to patients. In one of them, a caesarean operation was reportedly attempted under candlelight and the mother had to fight for survival in the post-operation period. In another reported case, the so called surgeon of an unauthorized clinic had cut off the respiratory passage of a patient when he was doing a tonsillitis operation under the light of a kerosene-lamp.
There are services which are extremely important for the simple reason that these involve human life and they are the medical services and centres for medical training. For the obvious reasons no compromise can be made in running them properly or in their standards.
Indeed, it is more than high time that attention from the highest level of the government be focused on such grave neglect of public health leading to absolutely unsparing and appropriate actions against these people who are putting people’s life at peril.