Ratty healthcare
Rats biting off parts of the feet of a paralysed Special Forces officer in an Army hospital in Delhi has made news. An inquiry has been ordered and there are expressions of consternation at how this could have happened.
The real question is why people are shocked. Is it because such a thing happened at all, or because it happened to a soldier in an Army hospital?
Instances of patients and doctors being bitten by creatures bigger than rats are fairly common at the country’s premier public hospital, the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi. Many a resident doctor has been chased down its hallowed corridors or cornered somewhere on its leafy campus by groups of hooligan simians.
All our public hospitals from AIIMS down suffer from a range of such ailments that have proved incurable thus far. Marauding monkeys, dogs and rats are only a small part of the problem. The real issue is the overall inability to keep hospitals clean and tidy. For this, the overcrowding at hospitals is largely to blame.
Our tertiary care institutions have many fine doctors. However, the queues at these hospitals, the crowds in the corridors and the sheer number of cases makes running these institutes efficiently a Herculean task. India needs many, many more facilities like AIIMS in Delhi or Sir JJ Hospital in Mumbai that give quality medical care at affordable rates. If the country could perhaps divert a fraction of the money that is lost to various scams, this could easily be done.
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