Closing Ad-din not the answer

The government's decision to cancel the licence of Ad-din Medical College Hospital imposed a harsh finality and most patients have already left the facility in search of alternative care. The Directorate General of Health Services chief Dr Pravath Chandra Biswas announced the revocation last Thursday after declaring the hospital's show-cause response unsatisfactory under the 1982 Medical Practice and Private Clinics and Laboratories Ordinance. A 30-day appeal window however remains technically open. The decision follows the deaths of six newborns under unusual circumstances in the hospital's post-delivery ward that provoked national outrage. Taking firm action against such gross negligence was undoubtedly justified, as was rejecting explanations that failed to properly address these fatal failures. None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute though is whether cancelling the licence of a hospital that serves thousands of low-income patients daily constitutes measured response or amounts to punitive overreach, and clearly, it is the latter. This extreme measure affects not only the institution but also the patients who depend on it for essential, life-saving services.
Ad-din has, over decades, positioned itself as one of the very few private hospitals in Dhaka where cost does not function as barrier to care. Millions of low-income and lower-middle-income families who are routinely priced out of elite private hospitals have relied on it for subsidised medical care. Particularly, many pregnant women have come to regard it as a dependable destination for maternal services at a fraction of what comparable facilities charge elsewhere. Erasing such a critical piece of healthcare infrastructure overnight creates an immediate and serious vacuum. The obvious question is where these patients will now go for treatment. Healthcare is not a service that can simply be paused while regulatory disputes are resolved. Thus, the closure of Ad-din does not really penalise incompetence as much as it transfers the consequences to the most vulnerable users of the health system and generates a public health crisis.
A glaring inconsistency is also at work here. Countless other hospitals across the country operate well below the threshold of acceptable management and infrastructure without ever attracting serious regulatory scrutiny. If a single catastrophic failure resulting from negligence is the standard for revocation, a very long list of private clinics and hospitals would have to lose their licences immediately. The only difference is that most such failures never break into public consciousness, whereas Ad-din's tragedy did. There is also a prior accountability question that the DGHS has conspicuously avoided. The ward conditions that produced six deaths did not emerge overnight, and a regulator conducting routine oversight would have identified those deficiencies long before they turned fatal. The negligence at Ad-din is indefensible, but the regulatory neglect that allowed those conditions to persist undetected is also a form of institutional failure, one that the DGHS cannot paper over by wielding its revocation powers after the fact.
What is needed is not a dramatic licence cancellation that pleases no one except those who mistake severity for effectiveness. The hospital's managing authorities should certainly face legal proceedings over the deaths, and those proceedings should move with urgency. Simultaneously, Ad-din should be placed under intensive regulatory supervision, required to implement corrective measures within a defined and short timeframe, and subjected to regular and unannounced audits to ensure compliance. This is not leniency toward an offender. It is recognition that the health system's obligation to patients does not end when an institution is being punished and that a regulator's duty includes rehabilitation, not only sanction.