CUTTACK: It was a usual morning at SCB medical college and hospital. A 48-year-old man, escorted by his son, was seen carrying his ailing wife on a stretcher to the diagnostic centre on the hospital premises, something that should have been an attendant’s duty.
Sadly, this is a regular sight at SCBMCH, which boasts of providing quality healthcare services to its patients. Patients and their family members are left to fend for themselves despite over 800 attendants positioned at the hospital. The hospital spends over a crore of rupees monthly towards engaging attendants for such work.
However, if a patient lacks manpower, then let alone receiving instant treatment, they are left unattended until someone from the hospital does the mercy of shifting them to a ward or the hospital’s diagnostic centres. The situation is being attributed to mismanagement and lack of proper monitoring and supervision on part of the hospital authorities. Shifting patients from one place to another is ideally the work of an attendant.
“After the doctor advised us to take my wife to the diagnostic centre, I looked for an attendant but found no one inside the ward. After waiting for over an hour, I carried my wife to the diagnostic centre and back to the ward,” said the 48-year-old requesting anonymity.
This is, however, not an isolated case. Several such incidents occur at the hospital on a daily basis where patients’ relatives are forced to handle such responsibilities. In another incident, two boys were seen carrying oxygen cylinders by themselves for their patient.
In fact, the recent incident where a patient fell from a bed in the medicine department intensive care unit (ICU) with no staff in sight has brought to fore the poor management at state’s biggest healthcare facility.
Sources said, the hospital has engaged around 839 attendants including 488 multitask, 282 multipurpose and 61 for destitute patients from an outsourcing agency. They are deployed in different places including casualty, wards and ICUs of different clinical departments to assist patients in receiving treatment. A sum of over Rs 1.67 crore is spent every month from the government exchequer towards payment of their salaries.
However, barring patients who either have influence or connections at the hospital, others are left to fend for themselves. Although the hospital superintendent, administrative officer and hospital managers come across such incidents daily, they choose to turn a blind eye to the issue.
SCB Rogi Suraksha Manch president Suresh Mohanty claimed that instead of performing duty at the hospital, most of the outsourced attendants either work elsewhere or are busy doing personal chores for the medical officers.
“The hospital authorities too, do not supervise them properly and blindly hand them their paycheck at the end of the month. The government money is being spent towards sustaining the outsourcing manpower agency,” he alleged. Effort to elicit response from SCB superintendent Prof Gautam Satapathy and additional superintendent Dr Jyotirmay Nayak on the issue however proved futile.