If one wants to make a lot of money safely, without any legal problems or face criminal prosecution, few are as good as running private hospitals. The corona pandemic has exposed people to more hospital care seeking than ever before and that’s how suffering has increased as well. People are left without any options except to seek hospital care and as government operated hospitals have limited capacity, many are forced to seek out private care. And what many if not most experience are horror stories. And there are no reasons to think that this scenario is going to change for the better soon.
We are used to telling and retelling Shahed’s story but that got the media attention because he had political connections and therefore became a political issue. It was more about how he used his political connections to make money. Apart from that, he was more in the fake testing racket and hospital care never really was exposed. Similarly, Dr. Sabrina was also part of the same testing rip-off scene and connections manipulator. Since then, many complaints and media reports have come out but the private hospital scare system remains healthy and happy although the horror stories go on.
The horror stories are in three sectors. A. Hospital facilities. B. Medical care. c. Bills and expenses. In all three there are serious worries but no mitigation. Chances of any mitigation are certainly not expected either. As it is people are so desperate that they don’t want to complain but the sufferings are gargantuan.
It’s not just the use and access of quality medical care that can lead to better health or recovery from corona but increased suffering. While the media reports infection and death rate every day , there is no way to quantify or measure human suffering during the corona period. As a result, they have just become reports which we have learned to ignore. It’s important to ignore them anyway because there is no way of stopping them.
But hospitals are not just about ICUs and oxygen; they are also about the way the patients are taken care of as a whole. This means the quality of service, management of care, appropriate caretaking and all the rest that comes with it. It also means care beyond the direct medical. The complaints that go around among the patients network relate to room cleanliness, toilet facilities, patient hygiene and food and so on. In fact there is not one sector in which there is patient satisfaction.
Finally, comes the bill. This has become such a major problem that the media has reported many cases where families have been pauperized by such bills which are so high that it’s impossible to cope with. In the case of corona, the impact of several family members in hospital can therefore be imagined. As if becoming sick, in cases dying isn’t enough, one needs to be economically devastated comes as a package.
No one seems to care and the patients don’t know what to do. Perhaps a new services sector providing assistance to patients needs to grow. Only the patients can help themselves.
