Since past many years, specially after the appearance of private hospitals of star value, we have been seeing many cases of vandalism on hospitals as also attacks on doctors and claims for monetary compensation from the doctors or the hospitals that treated the patients who did not survive.
In our city too, this kind of vindictive behaviour on the part of the patients as also their near and dear ones are not uncommon. As I remember, the then popular and famous B.M. Hospital, owned and run by Dr. C.B. Murthy, a well-known general surgeon in the 70s, 80s and 90s, soft-spoken, too gentle with patients and generally, on many occasions, had to face the wrath of the people connected to the patient who could not be saved or cured or whose hospital bill was too heavy to pay. Police help often came late to prevent the vandalism and the hospitals, being service organisation, did not venture to file Police complaint so also the doctors who were attacked. It was a delicate, difficult and dicey situation for them.
It is for this reason in our city about five years ago doctors, private hospitals and clinics took a novel step and formed an association called “The Mysore Association of Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Clinics and Diagnostic Centres,” MAHAN for short. Our weekly columnist and a well-known general practitioner Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD, is the President of MAHAN which is giving some hope to the traumatised and victimised doctors and the hospitals with the new-found strength to collectively face such violent acts and injustice. MAHAN will now interact with the Government agencies, Police, Public Prosecutor and other agencies in following up the investigation and the cases that either the victim or the Police have registered against the villains of the attack.
I do not know if MAHAN has been a boon or just a scarecrow. Let it be.
But here is good news to our Dr. Javeed Nayeem and his fellow doctors and medical entrepreneurs. Today’s newspapers carry some good news for them. The Deccan Herald has an item titled ‘No doctor can assure life to patient: SC’
This news must be music to the ears of all the doctors all over India. A Bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and V. Ramasubramanian has allowed an appeal filed by Bombay Hospital and Medical Research Centre against the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission’s order to pay Rs. 14.18 lakh to Asha Jaiswal and others for death of patient Dinesh Jaiswal due to medical negligence.
The Supreme Court said that ‘no doctor can assure life to his patient but can only attempt to treat to the best of his ability and if the patient does not survive, the fault cannot be fastened on doctors as a case of medical negligence.’ How true !
Like there may be a bad father but never a bad mother (very rare exceptions apart), there cannot be a bad doctor, though there may be some rare cases of greedy doctors. And a doctor does his best to the best of his ability.
My experience, as a hospital bird, is that the patient must be lucky to get a good doctor for treatment. Of course, each time, I was lucky. However, even otherwise, the patient has a choice of doctors. If he has made a wrong choice, why penalise the doctor?
Like a sting in the tail, the newspaper reports what the Court said: ‘It is too much to expect from a doctor to remain on the bedside of the patient throughout his stay in the hospital which was being expected by the complainant here.’ Amen
e-mail: voice@starofmysore.com
This post was published on December 1, 2021 6:25 pm