Avoiding unnecessary procurement for hospitals

Hospitals in this country cannot be said to have at their command the required and the latest gadgets or equipment. Procurement of machines or equipment for a hospital proves highly crucial. Intriguingly, however, the best of judgment is often lacking when one or more sets of armamentarium are procured without their relevance to a hospital. A Bangla contemporary recently focused on such procurement of a costly machine for one of the city's hospitals. Interestingly, this general hospital ranks far behind the Dhaka Medical College and Hospital and the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University. When these two hospitals have not yet procured any such machine, the rationale behind procuring it by that hospital has naturally been questioned by medical experts. The report carried in the contemporary also points out that the price quoted by the supplier is an inflated one.

This is not for the first time that dubious procurement of machines for hospitals has made screaming headlines. In a number of cases, machines were ordered from abroad only to discover that on arrival they were left to rust away for years. Those were never operated either because no technicians were trained to do so or a small part was missing from the machine. In other cases it so happened that a wrong specimen was imported and it proved completely useless. Clearly, in all such cases proper assessment of the need was not done and also a clout was behind the process not so much to serve the patients but to serve its own narrow interests. When such an ulterior motive is at work, the procurement of the right type of medical equipment proves secondary. The suppliers open up avenues for lining pockets of people responsible for procurement of hospital machines or equipment that prove unsuitable for the purpose. In the process, the hospital's capacity building suffers on the one hand and patients are deprived of a much needed service on the other. At times it may prove fatal because of the time loss. Patients are asked to go to a private or public facility at a long distance for certain medical tests when the in-house facility is out of order or was never made operational.

In a situation like this, approval of procurement of expensive medical machines and equipment has to be transparent. The authorities concerned cannot blindly approve of procurements that are unnecessary and doubtful. Hospitals should normally place their requisitions for medical appliances and machines in consistent with their requirements but because this is not happening, there is a need for an expert body comprising perhaps highly esteemed retired medical professionals. Any such committee or commission will know how indispensable the machine or appliances requisitioned for are to a particular department of a hospital. Any such body will moreover reserve the right to suggest procurement of advanced machines or equipment without which treatment of certain diseases suffer to a great extent. The bottom line is to avoid unnecessary procurement for hospitals and equip them as adequately as possible to facilitate medical treatment there.