Worries We Face in Our Government Hospitals

This is about a month ago, when I had got a chance to spend some time as an attendant of my maternal grandmother to serve her when she was admitted in a Surgical Ward ICU of Service Hospital, Lahore. Since I was her only grand daughter in Pakistan, so I along with my mother & one Khala took the responsibility of staying with her in shifts. Being myself from medical field, I was very well aware of the problems a patient & his attendant face in a public hospital. But this is a fact that you can't feel the pain of someone unless you experience that yourself. So this was the high time of experiencing what I had seen only during my clinicals in a little professional manner.  

My grandmother had been suffering from Acute Pancreatitis & Acute Renal Failure & after refusal of acceptance from a semi-private hospital, she'd eventually been brought to the Emergency Department of Service Hospital, where we're told with the excruciating news that her both kidneys had been damaged & the cause was acute Pancreatitis. I had diagnosed that already when we had got her blood specimen examined from a private laboratory when she was lying unconscious in the emergency ward of that semi private-hospital who hadn't told us anything about her condition even after seeing the reports & keeping her for almost 24 hours, but refused to admit her into any private room & told us the reason that they're lacking empty room & bed. But we knew the doctors didn't want to admit a patient who they didn't was just a guest of some days only or a bedridden-to-be patient. 

 It was 10:00 PM, I & the OTA carried her stretcher towards the ward where she's finally admitted, after she's injected with the CVP line. That was a surgical ward having 6 big hall rooms (Bay), but not a single bed was vacant for my patient. Doctors, after taking quite sometime had put my granny to a bed which was to be shared with another patient. It's so common in a metropolitan government hospitals, to have doublings & sometimes triplings on the patient's bed of which our government has never bothered to do anything. So I knew we had to adjust there. The behavior of doctors was so polite with me, one of the reasons was that they had guessed that I was very well aware of the whole scenario as well as my patient's medical condition. This is some edge you have when you go to a government hospital & talk to the hospital staff in a very educated manner. Lamentably, our lowbrow poors are not treated the same way & often misguided, a too hard fact to be denied. 

Now the time was to get admission slip for which the original CNIC was must, which I didn't have. Although I had the photocopy of that, but that wasn't acceptable & the whole staff refused to co-operate with me in that matter & the staff nurse spoke quite harshly with me. She was a fresh graduate & a newly appointed Charge Nurse by the government of Punjab, but I was wondering when this old traditional behavior of staff nurses will get mortified. Indeed, they work under a heavy load & only two or maximum 3 nurses work simultaneously to treat as much as 100 patients in a ward, for which we must appreciate them. Anyways, I called my mother at home who after spending around 36 hours at hospital had just went home before my granny had been finally taken to the ward. She could bring her CNIC after an hour of drive. 

 My grandmother stayed there for almost ten days, during which she's neglected by the senior doctors & the other hospital staff just like any other patient, despite the fact that house officers were in plenty of numbers available who treated her in quite good manner, but they were too junior & non professional to handle her & always needed their senior's guidance. During the whole of 10 days, my granny was not even a single time went for dialysis even I myself had taken her call to the dialysis department for almost 4 times, but neither any doctor came from there, nor did they bother to call my granny in their department. And since paramedical staff was also on strike those days, the entire hospital system was almost paralyzed without them. 

 My granny along with many other patients had to have her C.T Scans done from different private laboratories, as the hospital's CT Scan department was closed unless the demands of paramedical staff were fulfilled by the government, so they could restart their duties & the poor patients could be advantaged. Such medical protests, either from doctors, nurses or other hospital staff, bring a lot of inconvenience for the patients who completely rely on these public hospitals and government's ignorance to their demands put things more backwards. 

During my granny's entire stay there, 80% of the medicines, no matter how costly they were, had to be bought from the outside pharmacies. I remember this is happening for last 5 years that government hospitals are lacking enough funds to facilitate the patients with free medications. Gone are the days when injections as expensive as Rs. 5000 were available in hospitals. We could at least afford to buy such medicines for my granny, but I could imagine how the poors managed to buy those expensive drips, injections & I/V Canullas. If public hospitals are not meant to provide free medication to the poors, what's the use of the existence of government?  

It's certitude that the doctors, nurses & other hospital employees are obliged to work in a very limited sources available & sometimes without life saving prerequisites I.e. oxygen cylinders, masks, nebulizers & other emergency drugs in our government hospitals. It always leaves me wondering if our country is that poor or if the health budget is not sufficient for this growing rate of ill population. 

On the 10th day, my granny suddenly went into a severe hyperpyrexia & hypotension. Her O2 level had decreased to the alarming level. It was at midnight & due to the incomplete emergency trolley, we all attendants were running in and out towards the pharmacy every other second to save her life. There were no micro burrettes, no branullas & no adrenalines in emergency tray. We obviously were running to save our patient's life, but this is what government does to us the whole life "Running". Unfortunately, our running for her did nothing to her. My granny met Allah Almighty exact at the Fajar time leaving us thinking if we she was here for treatment or just for spending her last days.