Nothing can be worse than this. Review on Neelachal Hospital - Bhubaneswar

I had heard stories of new born children swapping and irresponsible paediatric care of this hospital. Only recently when Igot a chance to frequent this hospital I came to know that the storeis that I had heard are only tip of the iceberg.

Located very next to the most defamed slums of Bhubaneswar, hygiene is a far far away concept for this hospital. The crowd is by large the slum dwellers, however you see rich and middle class crowd as well, courtesy: a few(so called) well known doctors who refer their patients to this hell.

The road to this hospital is. in a single and most appropriate word, 'Bad'. I wonder how they manage to carry the critical patients through this road. The infrastructure is very old and rusted, forget the availability of any modern health care choices. Dirty floors, never cleaned even once during my 1 week's stint in this place. No common toilets available for the attendants. But the staff toilet water flows into the ICU. Flies and insects are plentily available in all the cabins and ICUs.

Now coming to the staffs: You can not get average treatment done here unless you have a contact in this hospital, it can even be a security guard or a sweeper. Even though you pay the money for your room, treatment etc, you will be compelled to bribe the staff, else they simply refuse to respond and take care of your patient. The security guards accept other favours apart from money as well, like calls made from your cells, tea. etc.

Now coming to the part that matters the most, patient care. The doctors might be available throughout the day in the hospital, but they will be available to each patient just for fractions of a minute. There is no team of doctors available for treatment of critical patients. Lets say you admit a patient for liver disease, the doctor/specialist will focus on the same ignoring all the other areas, so if by chance any other disease develops paralelly(mostly due to unhygienic conditions of the hospital) then the doctor will simply be unable to address that. As a result, my most chances a patient comes here with one problem but goes out with multiple health issues. The specialists under whom a patient is admitted, never refers his patients to any other doctor. purely due to Ego problems. They treat the patient like a machine, just giving them volumes of medicines, they never follow up or take special care of any patient. They do their duty so mechanically. There are only very few experienced doctors in Bhubaneswar, so in this hospital. The doctors are not worth mentioning, much much below standard in comparison to the good hospitals in the country.

The ICU doctor(there is only 1 doctor in the ICU) is a newbie and rude person, who goes out for dinner break of minimum of 2 hours, unavailable most of the times. The ICU is hardly a 450 square feet room having 8 congested beds in it and no partition between adjacent beds. The hospital even increases the number of ICU beds to 10-12 on need basis, all in that 450 sqft room. There is only 1 doctor, 1 nurse and 1 attendant available in the ICU, so the critical care can be well imagined. The attendant is a cleaner cum attendant, who cleans the stools and stuff of the patients and feeds them as well. So that the patients loose appetite after seeing this. The doctors do not take any responsibility of the patients, no special care can be expected.

I wonder how and why do such hospitals exist! Isn't there any audit happening? Veterinary hospitals will be much better than this place. It's high time to boycott and should down such places that just extract money from the patients without even providing the basics in Medical Care.