Pay attention to public hospitals affiliated with medical colleges
04 January 2023
That
Bangladesh's public health system is in tatters is no new news. It is
more acute in rural areas than in urban places, in cities and towns,
this is the general view. But when we see that the same situation
persists in divisional cities as well as the capital we have good
reasons to be worried.
According to a report yesterday, the very
Chattogram Medical College and Hospital (CMCH) is failing to deliver
treatment to patients with its limited number of workforce and
inadequate logistics. In this hospital, there is a shortage of doctors,
nurses and other third class and fourth class employees who are no less
important than the hospital's core medical staff.
Starting with 500
beds, this hospital has completed 65 years of its journey and now it has
2200 beds. Surely this is a very large hospital, but even this large
number of beds is not enough for patients in this lone tertiary-level
hospital in the greater Chattogram region. With its only 343 doctors and
1,228 nursing staffers, this public health facility is virtually
grappling with the ever-increasing number of patients.
Quoting CMCH
sources, the report mentioned that the hospital serves at least 3,300
patients on average in a day, 1,100 more than the hospital's bed
capacity. In the last five years though many new nurses have been
recruited, no new doctors were added to the list.
Still, patients do
not find drugs available in the pharmacy which is supposed to sell drugs
at subsidized rates. One can sense corruption in this irregularity. The
problem facing the CMCH is not unique to this public hospital alone. In
many hospitals affiliated to public medical colleges, the condition is
even worse.
Bangladesh government's budget for its health sector is
not of international standard in terms of the country's GDP. Despite
that every year it is found that even the smaller size of health fund
sanctioned by the government is not spent at the year end. The fund
remains unused.
It is a pity that patients here suffer untold
sufferings because health authorities do not know how and where to spend
money stopping corruption in the sector. This is the crux of the
problem the country's health system is beset with like any other
sector.
