Hospitals or death traps!

THE death of a woman patient from being stuck for one and a half hours inside a lift at Mitford Hospital on Saturday poignantly illustrates the abysmal lack of basic facility in most public hospitals. The playing-to-the-gallery punitive action on some petty employees was nothing more than tokenism, symptomatic of a deeper ailment afflicting management of our public hospitals. If one were to probe the number of times the lift got stranded over the last few years in hospitals, it would run into a horrific figure. There must have been many a close shave with death or accident or trauma from sheer claustrophobia. Yet the hospital authorities have been unabashedly stingy in not having replaced the lift nor maintained the old one to any working order.
There is more to it. Many hospitals have blood banks, but in name only. Patients' relatives have to run for blood collection from different points outside the hospital. They can and do end up in unlicensed outfits of blood banks having collected blood from diseased or otherwise ineligible donors as the needle-marked hand of a drug addict revealed in our news photo on Sunday's issue.
Even death has been reported of a child gasping for breath from a cylinder that did not contain any oxygen at all.
Leave aside the quality of pathological tests, x-rays, ultra-sonograms etcetera, most public hospitals lack basic management discipline, rudimentary maintenance standards and minimal hygienic environment. They have become more of commercial establishments than professional institutions devoted to humanitarian services.