Govt hospital in shambles

The Government General Hospital (GGH), Guntur has something to feel proud of as well as to be ashamed of, when incidents like rats causing death of a child take place at its premises. Successful heart surgeries and kidney transplants have earned it a good name, but the hospital’s development is lopsided on many fronts and resembles a triangle in upside down position reeling under the weight of its inadequacies and omissions while projecting a rosy picture on the top.

Health Minister Kamineni Sreenivas's admission of the sordid state of affairs in government hospitals with the exception of a couple of hospitals in Visakhapatnam district speaks for itself the nature of problems. GGH is no exception. It is not just the case of a medical personnel being negligent that is the problem but the maladies of the government run hospitals are reflected in poor medical infrastructure, inadequate staff strength including doctors and more particularly nurses.

Age old buildings, shabby rooms, rusted cots and poor quality surgical equipment are omnipresent. The state of bathrooms and lavatories are beyond description; people who enters the bathrooms will experience such a nausea that they have to stop breathing for a while. Amula Vijaya Kumari, Vice-President of AP Nurses Association in her interaction with the 'The Hans India' says that for three decades there were no recruitments for nurses.

For a hospital with 1500 beds only 186 nurses are slogging out, with each nurse taking care of four to five wards. The actual nurses’ strength is 600 but recruitments were being made even in place of retired nurses. Day-by-day the nurses strength is shrinking. The nurses feel that the medical and health staff is walking on land mines, which are sporadically exploding in the form of rat bite death or another.

The Medical Council of India norms recommend that the patient-nurse ratio should be one for one for those in ICU, AME, CCU and NCIL. For post operative care 1:3 and for general ward patients 1:5.There is a shortfall of 406 nurses in the general ward itself. The hospital, catering to five neighbouring districts, has inadequate clinical equipment. Medical doctors are working without promotions and with dissatisfaction.

The hospital has just one CT scan available and is operating amidst heavy pressure with demands for hundreds of CT scanning every day. The capacity of the CT scanner is 100 per day but 300 scans are being squeezed out of it. The hospital that is the only hope for the poor has patients and their wards looking for treatment and care amidst inadequate facilities and stark poverty staring at them.

The attenders and class four staff of the hospital are being criticised for behaving inhumanly with poor patients who have no penny in their pockets but the attenders like leeches suck blood from the patients and their relatives in the form of bribes for every work attended to. The president of GGH Medical Officers Association Dr K Santhaiah speaking to 'The Hans India' regrets that the government has not supplied the crucial equipment Diathermy used for surgeries, which had been indented for a year ago.

MRI, CT scan and complete X-Ray machine and C-Aron machine, which enables the doctor to locate the visibility of iron rod or foreign body placed in the body, are the hospital's immediate requirement. Presently in the absence of MRI machine, the hospital is sending 30-40 patients for MRI examination to a private facility in the city. Dr Santhaiah says that the government logic of accepting the lowest quoted tender itself is illogical as those who quote less and get the contract will for sure purchase poor quality equipment.

On the other hand the government should identify high quality suppliers in the market and straight away make purchases from the firm or make it conditional that only certain brands are acceptable. Even the potency of generic medicines is under question as the government does not inspect quality of generic medicines and no wonder its potency is questionable, the doctors opined.

Recently, YSRCP committee, which studied conditions in GGH, found the conditions in the hospital to be appalling and opined that the hospital itself needed a surgical treatment. Many of the hardworking doctors and nurses are unhappy that in many cases when the government itself is founding wanting in its responsibility, the medical personnel are made the scapegoat for a problem, which has its root in the failure of government high ranking officials itself.

By RAVI P BENJAMIN