After 15 long years, Dr Kunal Saha’s fight for justice finally ended when the Supreme Court of India awarded him compensation of around Rs 6 crores, plus interest for the death of his wife Anuradha due to the negligence of doctors at Kolkata’s AMRI Hospital. While the hospital will have to shoulder the major payout, the SC has chosen to send out a strong signal to the medical practitioner community when it decreed that three treating doctors will have to pay up some share in the compensation amount as well.
There are innumerable instances of medical negligence but few reach the courts and even fewer have this conclusion. What made Dr Saha’s saga unique? In television debates, Dr Saha spoke of the closing of ranks within the medical community and struggle to be heard. His advantage was that he understood the technicalities of the case and could fight the system. Also, he is a US resident and therefore did not have to worry about being a social outcast.
Thirdly, he was able to create global ‘noise’ and support for his cause by starting his own online campaign against medical negligence, called People for Better Treatment (PBT). On the PBT site, he hails the SC judgement of this October as ‘historic’ and invites all ‘conscientious people to join PBT in future efforts to remove the deep-rooted corruption from the Indian medical system and build a negligence-free healthcare system.’
Unfortunately, Aristotle’s warning that “one swallow does not a summer make” rings true. Less than a fortnight after the SC judgement, Dr Ketan Desai, whose license to practice was revoked after a complaint from Dr Saha, was elected back to the very body which revoked his licence, even though he still faces charges of corruption for taking bribes to register medical colleges. This makes a mockery of the Medical Council of India. With state medical councils lobbying for power, it is only to be expected that the Centre will crack down. (See Express Healthcare October 2013 Edit: Does the MCI need a ‘medical CBI’? http://bit.ly/16NHMZ4)
Industry too has to play its part. In May last year, India’s healthcare fraternity came together to form the Healthcare Federation of India (NatHealth) with the stated mission to be the voice of the industry, ‘to address urgent issues and in time redefine the space’ of Indian healthcare stakeholders.
In a recently released white paper, PwC and NatHealth identify six enablers which need to be put in place for India to achieve the MDG goals and provide affordable healthcare access for every citizen. Some of these include the formation of funding pathways (a government corpus for a healthcare infrastructure fund as well as allowing business trusts and real estate investment trusts (REITS) in healthcare), resolving pain points like establishing a transparent and viable pricing formula for healthcare reimbursements and standardising collateral and exit clauses for PPP projects.
NatHealth will have to voice the concerns of the industry as three key regulations come up for discussion in this winter session of Parliament: the Artificial Reproductive Technologies Act, the Indian Medical Council (Amendment) Bill 2013 and the Clinical Establishments Act.
Beyond finance and policy matters, NatHealth should also start a dialogue on ethical issues. India should not come to be associated with cases of medical negligence or instances of profiteering like in the surrogacy debate (Read our cover story in this issue: Surrogacy in India: Shedding its secrecy). Weeding out the black sheep and creating protocols to discourage and prevent bad practices is essential because it will build trust, strengthen the industry from within and create a roadmap for sustainable growth. It is no wonder that other Asian nations like Thailand have managed to brand their countries as first choice medical destinations, while India still struggles to get its act together.
It is thus critical that associations like NatHealth proactively engage with watchdogs like PBT rather than waste time and energy ignoring or worse, opposing such sentiments. For instance, if Dr Saha’s complaint had been taken seriously in 1998 when his wife died, it could have raised the alarm about other laxities at AMRI’s Dhakuria facility, where Anuradha was treated, much before the December 2011 fire killed 93 people, mostly patients. Could this tragedy have been averted?
Viveka Roychowdhury
Editor
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