My brother died in Safdarjung Hospital: Public healthcare is murder
Growing up in Delhi, my only exposure to the healthcare system in the country was private clinics and hospitals. That changed when my brother met with an accident a year ago, and I received a call at 4am on a Sunday morning from the people who had found him, telling me that he had been taken to the Safdarjung Hospital.
The nightmare that followed was an eye-opener on how excruciatingly painful it can be to have your loved one admitted to one of the supposedly best hospitals in our country.
When my mother and I reached the hospital, we found my brother lying in the casualty ward. The injuries were severe – his pelvic area had been run over by a truck tyre, crushing it completely.
There was only one attendant at the ward, who was either texting or playing games on his phone. When I asked him when a doctor would attend to my brother, he told me very nonchalantly, without looking up from his phone, that no one could attend to him at the hospital and that we should immediately have him transferred to a private hospital or he would bleed to death in a few hours.
“It happens here all the time,” he said. My mother asked why he couldn’t be moved to the intensive care unit (ICU), since his condition was extremely critical. We were flatly refused and told that no hospital beds in the ICU were available.
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| There was no sense of "emergency" in the emergency room. |
I looked around the overcrowded ward, which was more or less of a blur, and then at my brother, who was lying in a semi-conscious state on a stretcher that was dripping blood on the floor like a leaking faucet.
I remember asking a nurse if they would do something to stop the blood flow, if there would be a blood transfusion since he was losing so much of blood. She said nothing could be done till a senior doctor looked at him. They weren’t equipped to handle it.
Where are the doctors, I asked. “It is a Sunday,” she said, deadpan look perfectly in place. No one seemed to care that precious time was being lost and that this person could die because of their apathy. For them, it was just going to be one of the many lives lost every day.
There was no sense of "emergency" in the emergency room. By 6am, looking at the urgency of the situation, some relatives formed groups and rushed to different private hospitals in the city – Max, Medanta, BL Kapoor – but all of them refused to send an ambulance to take my brother in because no one wanted to take responsibility in case he passed away in-transit.
Because our country’s public healthcare system doesn’t feel motivated to do its job till an issue is highlighted by the media or until a politician intervenes, my employer, a member of Parliament, made several calls and tried to get my brother attended to by a doctor.
He was quickly moved to an empty bed in the operation theatre, and by 11am, a doctor finally appeared. Perhaps feeling irritable from being forced to work on his day off, the doctor threw a hissy fit (“How dare you have him moved up here? With whose permission?” he asked my father) and refused to operate on him. He asked for my brother to be taken back to the casualty ward, but that didn’t happen owing to political pressure.
When the time came for the operation, they realised there wasn’t a single unit of my brother’s blood group in the hospital; so the operation couldn’t be conducted till we arranged for the blood units. It took us a few hours to buy the number of units required, from different blood banks, but by then my brother’s condition had deteriorated even further.
It had been over 12 hours, a lot of blood had been lost, his blood pressure had become abnormally low, so the operation was cancelled and he was moved to the ICU till he could be made stable enough for the surgery.
The next day, my employer’s mother, a cabinet minister, found out about the accident and called to tell me she would be visiting my brother in the hospital later that day. “It will just make them take the case more seriously,” she said.
After her office informed the hospital of her visit, everything changed in an almost (tragically) comical manner. Within minutes, the apathy turned to concern and an impromptu cleaning drive was launched in the hospital.
The corridors that were earlier smelly and filthy were mopped every half hour with a disinfectant floor cleaner that smelled like roses, a floor polishing machine was taken out of the storage room for the first time since it had been bought (I overheard a nurse giggling and telling that to a colleague), cobwebs were removed, dirty sheets in the ICU beds were replaced with crisp, clean ones, all patients in the hospital were made to wear disposable sanitary caps, disposable sanitary kits (face masks, caps, gloves, shoes, aprons) were taken out of the storage for all ICU visitors to use. There were no more flies hovering around puddles of blood in different parts of the hospital floor.
All heads of departments were on duty with a huge smile plastered across their faces. The callous look had disappeared. Everyone looked forward to the celebrity visit. Everyone was on their toes. Everyone was suddenly interested in saving my brother.
Two days later, though, the excitement had waned, as it usually does. When I went to meet my brother in the ICU, the sanitary caps had disappeared from the heads of all patients, and I no longer had to spend five minutes wearing the sanitary paraphernalia – that is supposed to protect the patients from a risk of infection – before entering the ICU. I could just walk in, bacteria be damned.
The young doctor in the ICU told me that the kits had only been taken out for the minister’s visit, to show her that everything was up to the mark, and asked me if I could ask her to visit again. “It will help keep the hospital clean,” she said. I didn’t understand why the kits weren’t being used if they were there, but I no longer cared to ask. I was exhausted and just wanted my brother to become stable, so he could be moved to a safer, private hospital.
It took him ten days in intensive care for his blood pressure to stabilise for his first surgery. There were to be three operations. In ten days, though, his massive wound had become badly infected. He had pneumonia and his body was slowly starting to give up on the fight for survival.
His first operation “went well” but he was put under a ventilator because his pneumonia was worsening and the doctors didn’t want to put a lot of stress on his body. He didn’t wake up after his operation. The doctors called us to their office, told us that his organs were “collapsing” because of the various infections, and that while there WERE ways to treat it all, they were only available in some private hospitals in the city, so they were giving up on him.
We couldn’t move him to a private hospital because they said he would instantly die if removed from the hospital bed. Later that night, his ventilator was removed, his heart started to sink and he passed away from multiple organ failure. Had he been taken to a private hospital after his accident, there would have been a greater chance of him being alive today.
To read about the little boy who died this week at the same hospital where I lost my brother didn’t seem shocking to me at all. Having spent two weeks in the same hospital, I have seen and experienced how much a non-VIP human life is worth there. It’s bad enough to see a loved one fight for their life, but to be treated with such apathy and disgust in a place where one turns to, to HELP save one's life is absolutely torturous and soul-crushing.
While the dengue crisis is what needs to be addressed for now, the issue isn’t limited to just that. If this is the state of a government hospital in the capital, one can only imagine how frightening it must be in government-run hospitals in the rest of the country, especially in small towns and villages.
A six-year-old died because of the apathy and ignorance of one of the "best" hospitals in the country, and as expected, the Union health ministry has asked the hospital authorities to “enquire into the matter”. The issue will soon be forgotten and the “enquiry” files will be put in a dusty almirah, never to be opened again.
What the government needs to focus on, instead, is to make India’s top health institutions reliable and safe. Not just for the VIPs, but for those who cannot afford private healthcare and don’t have other options.