Chandigarh, October 30
For six days, Sukhjinder Kaur (32) fought for life, struggling for every breath, on and off ventilators in an air-conditioned intensive care unit of a top-notch corporate hospital, where when she died, all she begged for was one last meeting with her seven-year-old daughter.
Sukhjinder Kaur’s husband, a truck driver from Barnala, did not have time to even cry over her dead wife. He was busy selling his ancestral house in the village to pay Rs 6 lakh in hospital bills as without paying them his wife’s body would not be handed over.
Sukhjinder had walked into this hospital 10 days ago with an infected wound. She was admitted to a ward and after a few days she was shifted to the ICU where her condition deteriorated. Nothing seemed to be working on her. The antibiotic shots she was being given thrice a day proved useless.
The truth is that they did not prove useless…they were useless. As useless as an injection filled with water would be in such a case.
Use of substandard medicines, consumables and even implants like stents and ‘joints’ by some of the largest private hospitals is one of the most well kept secrets of the corporate healthcare system. And all this is done in active connivance with small companies manufacturing these medicines and equipment.
The injections, given to Sukhjinder Kaur and hundreds like her daily, had cost the hospital about Rs 30 while the patient is charged on the MRP, which could be Rs 300. And while an expensive drug from the patient’s point of view is a mark of good quality, in reality the drug is ineffective.
Other than antibiotics where the scope of using substandard brands is the highest, there is a big rip-off in cardiac stents and joint implants. Stents cost anything from Rs 13,000 to Rs 75,000. Chinese stents cost even less.
But every big hospital charges more than Rs 1 lakh to the patient as the cost of the stent. With margins as high as this, quality is the first thing to be compromised for easy profits. When a patient is admitted, he is given no choice by the hospital authorities to buy his own medicine or choose the implant. He has to just pay up at the counter and “everything else is taken care of.”
Other things used during in-patient care like bandages, cotton, syringes are bought by hospitals from non-descript manufacturers keeping the phenomenal margins in mind. The patient, however, is charged on the MRP with no guarantee of the quality of the product. A surgeon in one of the major corporate hospitals here admitted that the hospital chose to use very low quality suturing threads which often leads to infection in the stitches.
And since there is no check by any regulating authority on the quality of the products that these hospitals use, the patient’s life is at the mercy of the of the goodness of the hospital authorities.
(To be concluded)
