HYDERABAD: With the rising number of incidents of patient’s kin attacking and manhandling healthcare staff, doctors across government and private hospitals are pushing for better security measures and increased accountability. However, most government hospitals are understaffed when it comes to security guards and do not have the infrastructure to handle such situations.
The lack of alarm systems and CCTV cameras leave doctors at the mercy of the patients. However, many senior doctors feel that such situations can be avoided if doctors have an enhanced sense of empathy for their patients, without treating medicine as a business. Dr Shravan Kumar of Gandhi Hospital told Express, “Increasing the number of security guards and measures will not solve the issue. Doctors, especially junior doctors, need to be more empathetic towards their patients.
This is a current trend because doctors today treat medicine like a business without regard for their patients. Patients need to feel safe and not brushed aside by their doctors.” Recently, a junior doctor in Niloufer Hospital was manhandled by the attendant of an 11-year-old patient for removing the attendant’s bag from the ward bed that was restricting the doctor to perform her duties. This is the second incident in the city in just one month. A well-placed source from the hospital said, “It was possible to arrest the perpetrator only because of the CCTV cameras that caught the incident.”
However, other hospitals such as Osmania General Hospital, Petlaburj Hospital and Fever Hospital do not have the required number of CCTV cameras or an alarm system, like the one at Niloufer Hospital, to notify the Special Protection Force (SPF) on the premises. In fact, SPF is present only in big referral hospitals such as Niloufer, Gandhi and Osmania hospitals.
At Osmania Hospital, one will often witness throngs of patients’ attendants trying to sneak outside food into the in-patient wards which is handled only by a single security guard leading to ugly scuffles. Srinivas Reddy, security in-charge of Agile Security Forces at Osmania Hospital said, “We currently have 118 security guards for the entire hospital including all the three buildings, of which only 15 are female guards. We do have a requirement for more guards, however, the agreement can be amended once the term of the agreement expires. So we will have to wait another year to get more security guards.”