BHUBANESWAR: “Yahan ke staff baat nehin sunte hain, mai mar raha hun, jaldi aana tum. Gale se aur muh se khun nikal raha hai. Phone bandh kar raha hun...jyada samay nehi hai (No one is listening to me here. I am dying. You please come down. Blood is oozing out of my mouth. There is not much time” - these reportedly were the last words from Sitaram Prasad Sinha to his son Omesh Prasad Sinha over phone from the KIMS Covid hospital here at about 9.29 pm on May 24.
A panicked Omesh, senior technical director of NIC, Jharkhand, did whatever he could from Ranchi to contact the treating doctor through the call centre.
The call attendant connected him to the nursing station after repeated requests and when he asked why his father was bleeding, someone replied it’s because of Covid.
Three and half hours later, he received a call from the hospital that his 82-year-old father was no more.
“He was with a single kidney. But, the doctors adopted a completely wrong line of treatment. Blood thinners and steroids took away his life. The hospital even did not care to have his previous medical history and consult the attendant who knew about the drugs which are reactive to him. No consent was taken for administration of these drugs,” he alleged.
If Sitaram was a case of alleged wrong treatment, the case of Binod Bihari Sahu (45) of Arabinda Nagar in the city unmasked the cruelty shown by some private hospitals to the people in distress.
Sahu breathed his last a couple of days back after undergoing 40 days of treatment at Kalinga Hospital. His family members alleged that the hospital was paid nearly Rs 8 lakh, but they were kept in dark about his treatment.
“They continued to raise medical bills with an assurance that the patient is recovering. When there was no improvement in his condition, we shifted him to another hospital where he was received dead. We do not know what the hospital was doing for the last over a month,” said his son.
Even as there has been a steady decline in new Covid cases, fatalities continued to rise and negligence in treatment and attention to critical patients is a major cause.
Attendants alleged that no information on treatment is shared by treating hospitals despite the tall claims by the government on establishing help desks to strengthen communication.
“The Health department claims that people are succumbing due to delay in admission. But in our case, it is the hospital that failed to properly deal with the patient, who was a kidney patient. He was administered drugs that shouldn’t have been, in complete disregard to his pre-existing condition,” alleged Omesh.
The doctor, who had been treating Sitaram for kidney disease, Omesh said, had warned of using steroid and blood thinner.
“But the doctors at KIMS neither consulted us nor did they take our consent,” he said.
Omesh has lodged a complaint with the Chief Secretary requesting him to streamline the treatment protocol extending proper attention to people with past medical history so that no more lives are lost due to wrong treatment.
While no authority of Kalinga Hospital could be contacted for comment, medical superintendent of KIMS Dr Ambika Prasad Mohanty said he will be able to comment only after going through the patient’s medical documents.