IMA holds doctors responsible in Max hospital negligence case

New Delhi: Commenting on the issue of medical negligence involving Delhi's Max Hospital, India Medical Association (IMA) President on Thursday blamed the concerned doctors of committing gross mistake.

"There is a gross mistake at the level of the medical doctor who was attending the patient," IMA president KK Aggarwal told ANI here.

Doctor Aggarwal's statement comes after the newborn twin passed away during treatment at a hospital in Pitampura, yesterday.

Explaining the process of a person's revival after death, Dr. Aggarwal said there are two types of death in medical terms- temporary and permanent.

"There are two deaths - temporary and permanent. Permanent death means the heart has stopped, clinically the patient has died but the brain is still working. In case of hyperthermia the brain is alive and the heart can be revived even after four hours," he added.

Dr. Aggarwal further said in this particular case the mistake occurred when the child was declared dead, while her brain was alive, even though the heart had stopped.

"In this case, the mistake was they declared the child dead when the heart was dead, the respiratory was dead, but the brain was alive and therefore when the heart got revived, the child lived for another few days. So this is a basic mistake of diagnosing temporary death as permanent death," the doctor added.

Speaking on another incident of medical negligence, where the father of a seven-year-old girl, who died of Dengue in Gurugram's Fortis Hospital has alleged that the hospital has offered a total of Rs 35,37,889 for assuring to stop his social media campaign against them, Aggarwal said, "This is between the Fortis and the patient, but the matter is under investigation and this has to be tacked by whether this was a medical negligence or not."

However, Dr. Aggarwal also said that IMA is proposing that there should be an independent financial audit, quality audit and social audit programme for private hospitals.