The death of Avinash and his parents was as haunting as it was frustrating. (Source: Thinkstock Images)
They ran from hospital to hospital, praying for anyone to admit their sick child. By the time someone consented to treat their son, it was too late. 7-year old Avinash Rout died of Dengue in a Delhi hospital. For 24 hours, his panicking parents had run around the city begging for their son to be admitted. Five hospitals in the city refused.
Unable to bear the grief, the parents of the child jumped off a terrace and killed themselves. Hospitals in the eye of the storm will insist that they were inundated with dengue patients and had no place. I don’t doubt it, but how indifferent can one be to turn back a critically ill child? Where was the hippocratic oath that all doctors and hospitals swear by, which makes them promise that ‘they will apply for the benefit of the sick all measures which are required’?
Had the child belonged to a well heeled and well connected family, these hospitals would have found a bed. I saw a room being miraculously arranged in a top hospital during dengue season two years back after initial claims that there was no place. All it took was a phone call. The tragedy of this family was that they were ordinary lower class citizens.
We are a country that measures its changing seasons with the onset of diseases and dengue recurs like a nightmare every year. Yet our health system struggles. Families come to big cities for treatment with hope in their eyes and finances on a budget. But with no access to busy doctors or uninterested administration, patients and relatives merge in the endless stream at these fancy hospitals. They say it is easy to get lost in India’s big cities. What they don’t say is in how many ways. It’s a myth if you think healthcare is accessible to all even in urban India.
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Top doctors in metro cities now churn out treatment like a machine, some even performing as many as twenty surgeries in a day. Medical care is as much a corporate business as any other profession and chances are, many times services rendered don’t match the exorbitant bill you get served. Doctors operate and then leave you to take care of your post-op complications yourself. The more well known the doctor, the more his detachment. There is a reason why I still trust doctors in my hometown Jalandhar. Smaller towns still care.
Two very contrasting stories captured my heart together. The death of Avinash and his parents was as haunting as it was frustrating. Then I read the other news by a former colleague. A tale of grit and bravery against all odds by an 11-year-old girl in Jharkhand. She walked 8 kilometres carrying her younger brother on her shoulders to a hospital to save his life. He was suffering from cerebral malaria, the same disease that took their parent’s life. Doctors say he will pull through.
The apathy is our country is three fold. One, within our health system. Second, by successive governments, of our health system. Lastly, an indifferent society that does not even stop to give a helping hand to an accident victim, let alone allow an ambulance to overtake. We are no better than the hospitals who refused to treat little Avinash.
The lure of big money at top hospitals, which increasingly look more and more like hotels, has taken the noble cause out of the profession. Perhaps the expensive medical education in our private institutions hardens them. Doctors no longer want to serve the poor in our villages, though fortunately we still have exceptions. Those who are in charge of our rural healthcare are not trained adequately. Neither is the staff at majority of our government hospitals, which is usually what most Indians can afford.
Strengthening our system at the grass roots to reduce the urban pressure continues to be a challenge. It doesn’t help that healthcare is one of the most neglected sectors in the country. Even in this year’s budget, allocation in the health sector was less than expected. The dream of universal medical care for families like the Rout’s will remain a battle of life and death.
Instead we are promoting our country as a destination for medical tourism. A body with stakeholders, ministry officials, hospitals and experts is likely to be set up to organise the system better. It brings in the revenue, but as many would argue, it does not put our own house in order. Nor will it get rid of the callousness in our system. Or bring back Avinash.
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