Doctors shouldn’t hold patients to ransom

Agreeing with the writer under the captioned subject “ A call for respect in our hospitals!” I wish to add an incident which took place at the National Hospital, Accident Service, where my mother was admitted due to a fractured hip. The incident took place on  December 21 and she was admitted to the accident ward  where she was an in house patient;  the operation would  be done on Saturday, with a hospital stay of one week. To our surprise,  it never took place and there were other patients as well to be attended to by this particular doctor, who never turned up. Ultimately,  the operation did not take place. There were  two patients with the same issue and another young girl with  another issue. We had to discharge our mother from the national hospital and have the operation done at a private hospital with  much financial difficulties; the same was done by two more patients. The hospital does not seem to take any notice of the suffering of the patients. It was after a heated argument with the orthopedic surgeon that he came  to the ward to be spoken to. 

Now the latest seems to be that Doctors are not available to be spoken to by the family.  The family is kept in the dark. The story is that if the Doctors need to be spoken to, they need to be channelled. So in other words we have to channel the particular doctor while the patient is at the General Hospital, and meet him  in a private hospital to know the status of the patient. If not, most of the time the family has to speak to the nurses who are very reluctant and vague in their responses. 

Doctors are very good at keeping the patients at stake to protest for their demands. Is this justifiable? I think it is high time the government canceled their license as well as imposed a travel ban so that they cannot travel overseas as well. They earn so much by doing private practice and neglect the poor patients in the hospital. High time the government put an end to this menace. 

Sherrine Vero