A cure for vip culture

A cure for vip culture

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in the national capital has had the good sense to scrap its decision to open a special counter for patients referred by the OSD to Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda, who is also the president of the institution. But the fact that the country’s health ministry and its premier health institute could even consider relegating the 10,000-odd patients, who queue up at the AIIMS OPD counter everyday, to lower priority behind VIP referrals, smacks of an insensitivity odious even in a country where netas, babus and powerful people demand special privileges at public places as entitlements. The revoking of the decision in the face of opposition from the institute’s faculty is small consolation for the patients, many with life-threatening diseases, who start queuing up everyday at the hospital’s OPD counter hours before the registration process begins. The hospital has not done away with VIP referrals — it will continue with the earlier arrangement whereby its media and protocol division coordinated them.
Overcrowding is one of the many problems plaguing the AIIMS. In the absence of other similar speciality hospitals in the country, what was meant to be a tertiary care institution has become a primary healthcare centre for patients from all corners of the country. The Union government has plans to set up 16 AIIMS-like hospitals across the country and it is expected that these healthcare centres will take away a lot of the load of the country’s premier public healthcare institute. But that will take some time in coming. Meanwhile at the AIIMS, patients are turned away or given long dates because beds and critical facilities like radiation machines are booked. For the mostly poor and underprivileged medical migrants who can be seen squatting or sleeping on the pavements outside the AIIMS, this long wait can mean temporary homelessness, even death. But with the prospects of an exorbitant medical bill if they were to seek treatment elsewhere, the hospital is their last hope. Its already-taxed facilities could do well without having to bear the weight of the country’s privileged.
The AIIMS is not the only public hospital in thrall to VIP culture. Last year, also in the capital, the Safdarjung Hospital’s administration asked doctors to attend to patients referred by the office of the medical superintendent on a priority basis; these included VIPs referred by MPs, ministers and bureaucrats. That decision, too, was revoked. But it’s disquieting that hospitals and healthcare facilities are not immune to the effects of India’s obnoxious VIP culture. At the heart of the demand for rooting out this culture is a tenet central to democracy — equality, not just before the laws but also in accessing public institutions like the AIIMS.