NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Thursday directed the Central and the Delhi governments to provide medical treatment facilities required by all residents of Delhi who are suffering from coronavirus.
A bench of Justices Vipin Sanghi and Rekha Palli’s direction came while it was hearing a plea seeking ICU bed with ventilator facility for a 52-year-old suffering from Covid.
The court remarked that the obligation on the state to provide sufficient infrastructure to save the lives of people could not be understated.
However, the existing medical infrastructure in the state had been completely exposed, it added. “Now you are behaving like the ostrich with its head in the sand. When you defend this situation, then you are not rising above the politics. We always call a spade a spade,” the bench said to senior advocate Rahul Mehra, appearing for the Delhi government, when he argued that the court may not say the medical infrastructure was in shambles.
The bench said, “The existing medical infrastructure in the state is completely exposed. When it was put to the test and this court cannot turn away people like the petitioner by merely telling him that the state does not have the infrastructure to deal with his situation.”
To this Mehra said, “The existing infrastructure is struggling, but the court may not say it is in shambles as that has a different connotation to it. In the absence of oxygen what could the infrastructure do. Hospitals were reducing beds due to lack of oxygen.”
He said the government has taken several initiatives, like augmenting beds by 15,000 and ICU beds by 1,200, which are in the pipeline and the oxygen is also coming in.
However, the bench said, “No that is not right. It is not just oxygen. Is oxygen enough? If you have oxygen, do you have everything? Pipeline is pipeline. They are not there now”.
The court also stressed that false alarms regarding oxygen shortage should not be made by hospital management as they disturb the system and unnecessarily strain the already stressed government machinery.
The court said that when a hospital has oxygen stock of six hours or less, it should first contact its supplier. If no action is taken, then it should be escalated to the nodal officer and if even then no supply is received and stock is good for only around three hours, then the amicus curiae or senior advocate Rahul Mehra can be contacted, it said.
Why not use multi-speciality hospital? asks HC
The Delhi HC questioned the logic behind Delhi government’s decision not to use a 150-bed multi-speciality hospital, closed down due to insolvency resolution process against its parent company, when its services and that of its medical team were being offered by the doctor who established it.
The HC exhorted the government to “think out of the box” as “we are not in normal times” and there was a shortage of beds for patients “150 beds are there. We are struggling to find beds everyday. We are fighting for it everyday and you are saying you will not touch it (hospital). We do not understand the logic here,” a bench said.