The Hindustan Times and the Hospitals in Delhi

The whole of the last week The Hindustan Times carried a series of stories highlighting incidents of ‘negligence’ in high profile private hospitals in Delhi. The hospitals featured included Fortis Escorts Hospital, Max Hospitals, Apollo Hospital, Sir Gangaram Hospital and Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Hospital. Now these hospitals in Delhi are the best that we have. While, Hindustan Times has a right to expose cases of negligence in hospitals I am still not sure what purpose was served by these reports.

Here are a couple of points I would like to make about these ‘exposes’.

The cases reported highlighted horrific experiences consumers had in these hospitals. Most people featured in the story lost a loved one because the hospital failed to deliver adequate care and refused to take responsibility for what went wrong. These I am afraid were random cases picked up by intrepid journalists and made for riveting reading. However, the journalists doing these stories did not investigate the reason for these failures. The question why did these hospitals fail in their duty towards their patients remains unanswered. Was the failure a result of a doctor not discharging his duties properly, or was it a failure of the hospitals processes or both? Or was it negligence or an error of judgement on the part of a doctor? Did he deliberately mistreat a patient, was callous in discharging his duties, wilfully deviated from standard medical practices or just did not care enough?  

The High Tech Story

 I recently came across an intriguing piece of news on  the online WSJ about the efficacy of the 64 Slice CT  Scanner. I am familiar with this piece of high tech  gadgetry because I was tasked with marketing the  benefits of CT Angiograms, when Max Hospital had installed it at the Max Devki Devi Heart and Vascular Institute. I recall we were in a race with Apollo Hospitals, who had also bought  a similar machine and both of us wanted to claim that we were the first to offer CT Angios in the city of Delhi.

The WSJ piece titled ‘Doubts grow over High Tech CT Scans of the Heart’ refers to a study published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology and concludes that ‘in more than 50% of the subjects, CT angiography ‘detected’ coronary obstructions that simply were not there’. The study was  funded by the Dutch government and used CT scanners made by Siemens, Philips and Toshiba.  

The VIP’s at the Hospital Door

VIP’s with their peccadilloes are always tricky to handle and in a hospital the problem magnifies manifolds. If the VIP happens to be a politician, than he believes that he owns the hospital and everyone must be at his beck and call. This includes hospital staff, which is supposed to take care of the VIP at the exclusion of everybody else.

Ironically what escapes these VIP’s is that in many ways a hospital is a great leveller. You might be the mightiest of the  mighty, an illness treats you exactly the same as anybody else. It does not differentiate amongst its victims. When a doctor examines a VIP he does it the same as (I would presume) anyone else. The medicines work the same way, the course of the disease is not impacted by the office that the VIP holds. Thus logically a spell in the hospital must be a lesson in humility to the mighty ones. Alas, this happens but rarely.  

World Heart Day

Today is the World Heart Day.

World Heart Day is observed the world over on the last Sunday of the month of September. World Health Organisation estimates that annually over 17.5 mn people die of cardiovascular diseases. It is the world’s largest killer.

The theme of this year’s World Heart Day is ‘Know Your Risk’. Heart Disease is largely a consequence of the lifestyle choices that we make. True, some of us are predisposed to this disease because of our genetics, many of us make unwise lifestyle choices and suffer the consequences. Diet, Exercise and avoiding smoking are the simplest ways of keeping heart disease at bay. Yet so few of us pay attention only to regret later.