I came across this very disturbing news of a State Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission directing a Physician and a Gynecologist to compensate the family of a woman who died of anesthesia related complications during child birth.
You can read the full report of the judgement here.
However, the statement 'the commission dubbed the doctor a 'quack' for administering anesthesia despite not being qualified to do so' disturbs me.
At NJH, we don't have any specialists and we do much more than Cesarian sections where we give anesthesia for child birth. And there are umpteen centres which has saved many a life without the presence of the required consultants.
Yes . . . we do have a detailed system of taking consent where we make it very clear to the patient that we do not have specialists of any sort around.
But, in the absence of adequate public health facilities, specialists come at a premium in private healthcare. Leave alone specialists, even an MBBS doctor is costly for most of our agrarian populations.
Which is the reason that real quacks abound in almost the whole of the country.
And of course, I had written in a previous post about the availability of specialists in our part of the country to cater to the specialist needs of the community.
I wonder if the terminology of dubbing a medicine consultant a quack is really called for.
Would appreciate comments on this . . .
The big difference between your situation and this one is, I think, that this hospital is in Mumbai.....where there are so many other options, and certainly, anesthetists are always available (for a high price, no doubt!). This hospital was probably trying to save some money by avoiding the anesthetists.
ReplyDeleteNJH's situation is very different.
Having said that, it is probably going to become even more difficult to be generalists in this age of specialisation. Things are going to become worse very soon, when the Clinical Establishment Act starts being enforced.
I wonder if the solution is to have different rules for cities (where the problem is abundance, and poor accountability) and rural India (where the problem is scarcity of resources)...