Are You Scared of hospitals?

You wouldn’t probably go visiting a hospital on a free evening, or be called a luny if you did. And if an ambulance parks outside a neighbour’s door in the colony, your heart would pound as you wonder whom you might lose soon. 

Yes, hospitals are necessary evils you can’t wish way. They often become common bashing topics at parties. And the variety of sub topics that hospitals provide are varied enough to keep a conversation going for ages: attitude of doctors, the way nurses behave, the bedsheets, the long waits for investigations, the gentry, the inconvenience and long queues for payment, the escalating cost of care, how last time a person you knew went to that place and died (never mind if he had a terminal cancer and went there gasping), or if anyone who went in critically ill and came out better did so in spite of the hospital rather than due to it! And add to it the topics of unnnecessary investigations, delay in response, or that or that how cruel it was of the doctor to say that there was no cure for this disease, and you have your day.

 TV serials have added another aspect of this changing patient-doctor relationship. Every time a doctor faces anxious relatives overwhelemed with emotions,to say that the patient is critical or dead,  gets his collars pulled and shoved around in disbelief. If Ekta Kapoor has her way, doctors will soon become extinct.

What am I getting at? Can hospitals become friendly places that you may care to visit without feeling so nauseous? And if hospitals are essential to the society we live in, can we put in our small efforts to improve them?

The World Health Organization has initiated a new concept called Health Promoting Hospitals. They could play a larger role, not just tending to sick patients but in promoting positive health to friends and relatives who accompany the patients. For instance, a patient admitted with terminal lung cancer due to years of smoking, may have smoker friends and relatives who come calling; hospital could be a perfect setting for providing simple, attractive, IEC (Information, education and counselling) packages. This, in fact, may be the best time and place for the smoker friend to be motivated to quit smoking.

Promting Health is unfortunately much more than putting signage and passing orders. “No Smoking” does not convey quite the same meaning. Charts, pictures and friendly counselling services can achieve much more!

And what has been your role in improving the hospital in your city? It is a nasty question to ask in a party, but the responses are predictable. Businessmen say “It is the government’ job” , beaurocrats say  how they sanctioned funds to the hospital when they were in the concerned department, but sing praises of the private hospitals where they go for their own treatment nowadays, ladies aah –ooh and say “how unfortunate” , while many simply walk away to join another group.

Do you really care? You can make a difference!

 As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 15 november , 2009.