The Hindu Business Line : Private hospitals

FROM all that I hear of experiences of relatives and friends with the functioning of private hospitals, I get the impression that they are getting to be a law unto themselves.

Like education, private health care has also become a purely commercial activity, carried out with the same eye for the bottomline as in the case of other business enterprises.

Of course, in order to avail themselves of subsidies and tax concessions from the Central and State governments, they undertake to provide free or low-cost treatment to a given number of patients from the poorer sections, but in practice, while the private sector companies come under the regulatory controls exercised by SEBI, there is little effective monitoring of the working of the private hospitals by either the Government or the Medical Council.

The result is they are left free to run their establishments pretty much as they please, making their own exorbitant demands on patients and on occasions, even violating basic human rights.

For instance, when the brother of a former Finance Secretary died at a private hospital in Chennai, the hospital authorities allegedly refused to release the body unless the residual amount of the bill was paid in cash, and not through credit card.

It was close to midnight when the city was facing the worst deluge in recent decades, and the relatives had to negotiate flooded streets looking for an ATM to get the cash. If this could happen to a person of some stature, the plight of the ordinary citizen having dealings with such hospitals can well be imagined.

It is high time the Government established a Private Hospitals and Nursing Homes Regulatory Authority for fixing reasonable hospital and professional charges, criteria for regular medical and operation audits, and punishments for flouting the directions of the Authority in regard to qualifications for the various categories of personnel, the availability and maintenance of equipment, the requirements of space, standards of hygiene and the like.

Without some such stringent supervision by an independent body, patients cannot be assured of decent and dignified treatment in every sense of the term.

B. S. Raghavan

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