An acute shortage of qualified medical staff and rampant mismanagement of space and services means patients have to wait for hours to see doctors, and months for scans and surgery
A hospital in Kandivli that the BMC spent Rs 167 crore on, ironically witnesses the death of about seven or eight of its patients every day.
Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Municipal General Hospital is now the largest peripheral hospital catering to residents between Nallasopara and Jogeshwari. Pic/Pradeep Dhivar
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Only inexperienced MBBS graduates run the facility, with no postgraduate doctors available to examine and treat patients, resulting in long delays and substandard treatment. mid-day’s visit to the hospital exposed the chaos rampant within its walls.
Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray inaugurated the newly constructed 324-bed hospital on September 2 last year. Its name was changed from Centenary Hospital to Bharatratna Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Municipal General Hospital.
It is now the largest peripheral hospital catering to residents between Nallasopara and Jogeshwari, after Bhagwati Hospital was shut and the indoor and OPD sections shifted here.
Mehul Katariya, an RTI activist and resident of Kandivli, said, “The hospital is in a complete mess. There are no senior MD doctors available on board.
Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Municipal General Hospital in Kandivli.
Mostly, students from Nair Medical college and MBBS doctors have to handle OPD patients, that run into a few hundreds daily. They have set up an MRI and CT scan centre, but there is no CT scan facility yet.
Appointments for MRI scans are usually given a month after date of application. For surgeries in both orthopaedic and general wards, patients are put on the waiting list. The hospital does not have a blood bank facility.
A view of the BMC Hospital in Kandivli from a distance. Pic: Pradeep Dhivar
Moreover, they do not have any cardiologist or cardiac ward, which means that in case of any heart attack, they either give only preliminary treatment or just transfer the patient to another hospital, which can prove fatal for the patient.”
A doctor attached to the hospital admitted, “We only have honorary postgraduate senior doctors, who attend the hospital once in a week. We have no full-time lecturers or professors with postgraduate qualification.
Most of the doctors are either from Bhagwati or are MBBS graduates from Nair Hospital, who are not trained to handle critical cases. None of the three branches of Medicine, Surgery and Orthopaedics have postgraduate doctors.”
“The mortality rate in the hospital is around 7 to 8 per day. One of the reasons for this is that the existing team of doctors is not able to handle critical cases and do trial and error treatment,” he added.
Another doctor added, “Most of the surgeries need to be postponed, as anaesthetists are not available after 2 pm. Also, the Operation Theatre area is so small that it gets congested easily. Life support systems are seldom used, as no technical experts are available round the clock.”
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