COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

'Those children could have been saved if a doctor had been on duty'

Mukhtar Ahmad in Srinagar

One patient per bed, one bed per patient -- that could well be the norm in hospitals worldwide, but in the Kashmir valley, with just one children's hospital to boast of, such norms have long since been thrown to the wind.

Four children, five if you can squeeze them in, share a single bed in the overcrowded facility. Five, again, is the number of children who died earlier this week, reportedly due to negligence on the part of the attending doctors.

"I went crying up and down the corridor, I knocked on every door asking for help, I saw my child dying before my eyes but there was no one to help," cries Abdul Salam, hugging the body of his infant doctor to his breast.

"Doctors? These are butchers!" he sobs. "They don't care for the poor, they are busy with their private practice and have no time for people here who cannot pay!"

Hospital attendants -- long inured to disease and death -- speak with distress of how they raced from ward to ward on Monday night, seeking doctors while the condition of the five unfortunate children steadily worsened. There was, however, only one solitary nurse to be found -- she fought singlehanded to save lives, but failed.

"At least three of those children could have been saved," says Mohammad Hussain, an attendant, "if a doctor had been on duty."

The outraged attendants, joined by grieving parents, created a law and order situation as they milled outside the hospital premises, shouting slogans against the doctors and the administration and pelting stones at the premises. The police were forced to resort to a lathi-charge to disperse the mob.

Meanwhile within the hospital, the sound of sobs echoed off the walls as parents and relatives of the dead children thronged to collect the corpses. And as always when tragedy strikes, the people of the locality rallied around, bringing food and drink for the afflicted, helping to arrange transport, doing what they could or, simply, being there in support of the grief-stricken.

For their part, doctors lay the blame on the eight-year-old turmoil in the valley. "Services have collapsed, we have 300 patients in a 175 bed hospital, but we don't have staff even for the stipulated number," argues Dr Riaz Ahmed. "As it stands, there are only three senior doctors and 12 residents to treat both the outpatients and the admitted ones. The ratio of senior doctors to patients is 1:100, how can there be proper services?"

An identical situation prevails across the valley -- and the chronic shortage of doctors, we are informed, has been aggravated by the eruption of militancy, that has prompted most highly qualified medical staff to leave in search of quieter pastures elsewhere.

Kashmir Divisional Commissioner S L Bhat, who visited the children's hospital in the aftermath of the tragedy, meanwhile announced an enquiry and added that the report is expected shortly. The official spin on the incident is that all five children were suffering acute respiratory infection, and were in a serious condition when they were admitted that morning.

Interesting, as an indicator of which way the official report could go. And also controversial -- since Abdul Salam categorically states that his daughter and the other four children had all been admitted at least a fortnight before the tragedy.

Finger-pointing exercises meanwhile continue. "Look at the filth, the rotting food lying around, how can a patient survive here when the place is so filthy, so badly ventilated, with rats running loose all over the place, even biting the patients?" demands Arshad Ahmed, whose child is a patient. "How can ideal conditions be maintained given the overcrowding, we need a five hundred bed hospital and sufficient staff in order to do our job," replies Dr Kaiser Ahmed. "This is an old building, that explains the rats, we have now recommended measures to the government to check the rat menace."

Medical superintendent Mehboob Fatima meanwhile tended to dump all the blame for the controversy on the media. "The children who died, they were all villagers, they were admitted only on Monday and all were in a serious condition," she maintained.

Tell us what you think of this report