DMCH's requirements must be met urgently

THE drawbacks of Dhaka Medical College Hospital, the medicare facility of the last resort for the poor and middle income group patients and the premier medical teaching institution of the country, are much too known to bear anyrepetition.
So severely understaffed is the institution that whatever infrastructure exists cannot be utilised optimally. Given the size of the hospital and the number of patients, indoor and outdoor, totaling 4100 per day that it has to handle, the existing manpower strength needs to be tripled. Evidently, the cap on recruitment since 2004 has been a glaring blunder that needs to be immediately removed. The huge gap in the patient: manpower ratio cannot be bridged overnight, but there are two options that can be applied in the shorter run. Six hundred and fifty additional pairs of hands including doctors' are assessed as the bare minimum recruitment requirement for the present to handle the patient load with any degree of efficiency. Secondly, the implementation of the ECNEC-approved proposal for building 600-bed new strength at the DMCH which has got underway must be expedited.
Much of the deplorable performance of the DMCH can be put down to poor administration and management fuelling corruption and abuse of facilities. There are two problem areas where the dross needs to be cleared up: first, the chief obstacle to patients' receiving prompt professional medical attention and in-patient treatment is personified by the brokers' racket. There is an abject lack of any elaborate system of help desks, let alone that of signs and directions pointing to where the patients need to go with their different kinds of ailment. Merely displaying posters reading "beware of brokers" is a cruel joke when otherwise they are actually allowed to thrive by corrupt minions of the hospitals on whom manifestly the writ of the administration does not apply.
Granted, the doctors are short-handed, but then it should be quite possible for them to give a reasonably patient hearing to the desperate care-seekers rather than scribbling out prescriptions in huff and hurry as they often do.
It's time the hitherto neglected maintenance staffing and budgeting receive some attention. Poor maintenance is eating into the vitals of the DMCH's equipment base. In this context, the overall need for the ministry of health and family welfare to reduce its bureaucratic stranglehold on the hospital can hardly be overemphasised.