Are you a sick person abhorring the thought of getting admitted in the hospital for want of any dear ones to keep you company? No need to despair. For, little known to many, professional bystanders have been on hire for almost two years now, to meet exactly this requirement.
Call it a tweaked form of home nurse service or a viable business model. If you come across the board ‘Hospital bystanders available for hire’ don’t be surprised as it is a new ‘business’ that is emerging from the corridors of hospitals across the state. The 250-odd agencies active in parts of Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Kozhikode and Kottayam vouch that the ‘business’ is finding many takers in the literate state that hitherto had boasted about its relationship values.
Antony Pears, from Shakthikulangara in Kollam, a home nurse by training has over the last couple of years successfully reinvented himself as a hospital bystander — taking care of sick patients, buying medicines and spending long hours outside ICUs. He earns anything between `200 for a short four-hour stint to `300 or more for a full 24 hours.
“Most people nowadays have money but no time to take care of their loved ones. From psychiatric patients to accidents victims, till now I have served more than 500 patients as a bystander,” says Pears, who is currently on an 8-hour duty as a bystander for an accident victim at Thiruvananthapuram Medical College Hospital.
According to him, taking care of psychiatric patients takes special talent.
“Even the parents were afraid to spend time with a youth for whom I turned bystander at the Oolampara mental hospital. I acted as if I was the patient and asked him to take care of me and it worked,” reminisces Pears.
Subhadra Ammal, 65, is another bystander who just completed her five-day duty at a noted private hospital in Thiruvananthapuram taking care of a 67-year old lady, whose three children are too busy to take care of her while in hospital.
“We are provided with an ID card from the agency that recruits us but the relatives of patients often ask us not to wear it. They don’t want to be seen doing what they actually do - recruiting a bystander to take of their loved ones,” says Ammal, who earns around `8000-10,000 per month in her newfound vocation.