Private hospitals without emergency services!
April 30, 2010 00:00:00
Number of hospitals and clinics are rapidly growing in the cities and upazila towns nowadays. Those hospitals are providing services to the patients with many simple and complex diseases everyday. However, for the emergencies, still the people have to rush to the public hospitals. But why?
Once my two year old son swallowed couple of my mother's isoniazid (antibiotic for tuberculosis) while I was away from home. Anyway, I rushed home and took him to the nearest private hospital, the Bangladesh Medical College Hospital. Unfortunately, I was turned down by the attendant that they didn't have any poison management unit there. And I was told to take him to the DMCH which was still a half an hour tour to be there. But somehow we managed to be there before it was too late (although it could not be as harmful to the child as we thought earlier).
As I know, not only the BMCH but all of the private hospitals also as well as clinics would turn me down to attend that minor poison induced baby. Why so? It poses a serious question to be treated seriously. When an institution like the hospital is preaching its humanitarian services for all the ill patients, why there an instant service for a truly needy individual will not be welcomed? Fortunately, the attending doctor at the DMCH did not even prescribe a single dose of medication for my son. Such a simple case was it!
KMN Sarwar Iqbal
Faculty, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, IUBAT, Dhaka
E-mail: kmnsiqbal@gmail.com