Rajahmundry: Private doctors in East Godavari, are fleecing the patients by charging them heftily for varied services like consultation, lab test, pharmacy and other services even as the law enforcing authorities remain mute spectators.
The doctors are charging consultation fee ranging from Rs 200 to Rs 500 and above per patient and its validity varies from a week to two weeks and above. The moment a patient arrives at the hospital, the doctor prescribes a series of tests and they are to be conducted at a lab attached to the hospital.
Based on symptoms of patients and test reports, the doctor prescribes several medicines scribbled illegibly on a sheet of paper and state they will be available only at the hospital attached pharmacy. Some hospitals always have a huge rush of patients while in other hospitals, the doctors remain idle with very few patients. Patients are getting attracted to the big hospitals where more number of patients are seen waiting for a long time instead of finding out the academic qualifications, experience and success rate of the doctors before visiting their hospitals to get medical treatment.
Meanwhile, consultant doctors are employing junior doctors who have their medical graduation degree from foreign countries like Russia while some are MBBS degree holders from the country. Though there is a norm that foreign medical graduates are supposed to clear the Foreign Medical Graduates Examination being held by National Board of Examinations under the direction of Medical Council of India to practise medicine in India, the consultant physician or surgeon are engaging medical graduates from mainly Russia even if they have failed to clear the screening test. These doctors are being paid much lesser too.
Meanwhile, several hospitals in the city are adopting the same practice in blatant violation of the norms. As the patient is supposed to visit the junior doctors at the first instance and explain their health issues, the junior doctor prepares a report and sends the patient to the consultant who in turn prescribes medicines and the course of treatment is told without wasting more time on a patient.
In case the junior doctor fails to understand health issues explained by the patient properly, the consultant doctor gives wrong medical treatment. There were instances where a single consultant physician attended to 120 patients under Arogya Sri scheme in a day and a consultant surgeon performed six surgeries in a day. This means, officially one consultant physician or surgeon heads a hospital while others including those unauthorised to practice medicine, will support him in providing treatment or carrying out surgery.
The patients along with their attendants find it harrowing to wait to get their turn to consult the doctor as they arrive early in the morning to register and stay back. The doctors after taking up rounds to check the in-patients and also meeting the medical representatives, start consulting the patients just before noon and stay back up to 2.30 pm. The patients and their attendants complain that they aren't enough number of chairs to sit and no water to drink. The hospital authorities hardly allow the fans to run and though there is a TV, it is never switched on.
The patients appeal to hospital authorities to fix the time of consultation so that they arrive at the hospital at that time only and get examined instead of making waiting for long hours.
East Godavari medical and health officer Dr T.S.R. Murthy said, “We are advising patients to visit government hospitals as they have well-educated and experienced doctors to treat them properly instead of rushing to private hospitals and suffering a lot for various reasons. We will check violations and initiate necessary action on erring hospitals.”
Healthcare mafia
Pharmacies attached to hospitals are being run by doctors’ kin having no licence to do so in a majority of cases while drugs control administration authorities fail to act on such violation.
Hospitals are being run in multi-storied buildings with no parking facility and all vehicles get parked on road margins blocking the roads while the municipal corporation authorities and police personnel fail to initiate any action on this issue.
Patients complain about faulty surgery, wrong or overdose of medication causing hardships to them. A patient who suffered fractured leg and jaw was given treatment under Arogya Sri for fractured led and forced to leave with fractured jaw as its treatment is not covered under the scheme at a private hospital in city recently.
Doctors do not take patients seriously as they hardly get access to professional profile like in Western countries. Doctors’ success are measured in terms of owning huge buildings.
