Kiran rings health alarm

Subhankar Chowdhury

Calcutta, Aug. 18: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the chairman and managing director of biotechnology company Biocon, today said incidents like the Gorakhpur hospital child deaths should trigger the debate "why we spend only 1 per cent of our GDP on health care". Mazumdar-Shaw, who was awarded DSc (honoris causa) by Presidency University, said: "A very, very worrying trend in India is that we spend only 1 per cent of our GDP on health care. And a debate has started because of incidents like Gorakhpur. Today, you look at all our primary health centres, tertiary health centres, district hospitals. You know we have a huge challenge. We have a resource challenge and an infrastructure challenge." Mazumdar-Shaw flagged the issue in her speech after inaugurating an auditorium named after Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis - an alumnus of the erstwhile of Presidency College who later headed the institution as its principal - at Baker Building. As many as 30 children had died at Gorakhpur's Baba Raghav Das Medical College hospital between August 11 and 12, allegedly after oxygen supply was stopped over unpaid bills. Speaking to The Telegraph later, Mazumdar-Shaw said the incident in the Uttar Pradesh hospital was symptomatic of "lack of standard of care". "To cover everything, you can say it is symptomatic of lack of standard of care, which is itself symptomatic of poor administration, which again is symptomatic of poor infrastructure." Mazumdar-Shaw alleged that most people working in district hospitals don't follow procedures and don't have standard protocols. "For instance, in the Gorakhpur case, I am told the oxygen levels were not where they should be. I am told that there was no standard protocol. People were just being dealt with in a very ad hoc way." Mazumdar-Shaw stressed the need for a good "cause analysis" to find out what had gone wrong in Gorakhpur and suggested surprise inspections at hospitals. "You have to have a lot of frequent inspections, audits. All our hospitals should go for a regular audit system, audit checking to find out what ails them. And it should be spot inspection. If you come on inspections on a pre-announced date, like in six months, on that particular day, they will be very good." Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath had held a review meeting at Baba Raghav Das Medical College hours before the deaths. But he had missed the most glaring of lapses - the unpaid oxygen bills, the vendor's threat to stop supply and the hospital's repeated request for funds. The head of Biocon, who in her speech advocated providing health care at affordable rates so that the poorest of the poor can benefit, said hospitals should have technologies to ensure good accountability and compliance. "We don't have this compliance culture. This compliance culture is very, very poor." Mazumdar-Shaw contended that in India, lack of standardised treatment protocols and infrastructure lacunas went beyond government hospitals. "Even the private sector has it (the problem). So don't start saying only government hospitals, centres have these problems. There are some big private groups, which have very good standards. But some of the smaller private health care facilities have these problems."