Errant private hospitals must be reined in

One must admit that in the last two decades or so, the private hospitals have helped in supplementing the public healthcare sector in Bangladesh to a great extent. However, the need to beef up an inadequate public healthcare system saw a mushrooming of private hospitals and health centres, many of which, as it turned out eventually, did not have the required credentials to run those organisations. One of the positives of the pandemic, if a calamity can have any positive at all, has been that the actual conditions of a large number of such poorly staffed, badly set up, and inadequately equipped and run hospitals, lab centres and other such facilities have been exposed. The purpose of these hospitals is simply to make profits; providing healthcare is more of a secondary objective. The pandemic has also, painfully, bared the corrupt nexus between unscrupulous health service providers and health officials, without whose direct collusions such facilities would not have been able to exist and operate in the first place.

It is shocking to see how some of the private hospitals have overstepped their remit and treated patients for Covid-19, violating government orders. The exorbitant amount charged by some of these hospitals from patients for the treatment of Covid-19 defies logic. This has been the practice for a long time. Consequently, private health facilities of all definitions have become money-making concerns rather than healthcare providers.

One would have hoped that after the experiences of last year, the DGHS would be more proactive in bringing the hundreds of private hospitals, clinics and lab centres under scrutiny. Early this week, the health directorate inspected three hospitals in the capital's Uttara and found anomalies that border on criminality. While we commend the DGHS for launching quick investigations and temporarily suspending their operations, we would have hoped that the inspection had been done sooner, and not after receiving complaints from aggrieved patients. We also believe that the licences of these and other such facilities should be cancelled for good.

We suggest that the health administration carry out extensive combing operations to detect such errant establishments on a regular and proactive basis. And not only should their licenses be revoked, we believe their acts of commission and omission, which have resulted in a large number of deaths, should be treated as murders and duly proceeded against. We also think that the corrupt elements inside the health administration, who help keep these establishments afloat for their own benefits, should be identified and dealt with accordingly. Nothing less than proactive and stepped up vigilance can stop this nuisance in the name of healthcare.