CHENNAI: Beyond the walls of what looks like an untroubled island within the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB) premises in Perumbakkam where their Primary Health Care centre is situated, is a circus of sorts.
The sole doctor on duty at the PHC comes in at 9 am and does not stay past 11 am on most days when the doctor is mandated to stay at the centre from 9 am to 4pm everyday. On both times that Express visited the premises over a period of three weeks, a single staff nurse was on duty- doing the work of a doctor, a compounder and a nurse in the only PHC for 13,000 families. These families were mostly forcibly evicted from various parts of the city and resettled to the TNSCB tenements in Perumbakkam.
Express visited the centre, accompanying a Perumbakkam resident who came to the centre on account of a tooth ache at 5pm on Tuesday. She was treated by the sole staff nurse who gave her two tablets and asked her to drink plenty of water.
Worse still, residents said that until recently, the hospital worker (sanitary worker) on duty wrote prescriptions and supplied available medicines. On days when there was a staff shortage, this hospital
worker took on an entire shift himself which meant that he was the only person in the entire hospital, handling any case- emergency, or otherwise, that came to him, endangering the lives of the average
160-180 patients that visited the PHC daily. In many cases, he is taken to be the doctor by residents who earnestly hang on to his every word.
“Such is the value for our lives. For a long time we thought he was the doctor and our people here still ask him for medicines. It is not the hospital worker’s fault. If the doctor had been on duty in the mandated hours, why would the sanitary worker be forced to take up this work too,” said Priyadharshini K, a resident of the TNSCB tenements in Perumbakkam.
A few hospital staff Express spoke to, confirmed that this was indeed the case but now he has been asked to stay away from attending to the patients. Now, the pharmacists and staff nurses take over the work of treating the patients after the doctor leaves.
No maternity care:
Perumbakkam is one among the four of the forty PHCs under the Chengalpattu health unit district that do not have maternity care. With its population of over 50,000, there would be around 80-100 EDDs
(Estimated Date of Delivery) for a given day. All these cases are sent instead to other health centres- private and public.
According to official data, the Medavakkam health care centre presently handles the most number of deliveries of the forty PHCs, handling 38 deliveries in the last month. Express found the labour
ward and the Non Communicable Diseases (NCD) ward at the Perumbakkam PHC to be locked.
When contacted, a senior health department official said that the hospital worker was not authorised to treat patients and that he would personally inspect the PHC.“The doctor should not leave the premises before 4 pm,” he said.
As for maternity care, he said that since the Perumbakkam PHC was new (over six months old), the maternity care services have not been initiated yet.“We have all the necessary infrastructure in place and we will begin maternity care soon,” the official said.