For two days this week – Wednesday and Thursday – all services at Goa’s premier medical institute came to a grinding halt as inspectors of the Medical Council of India (MCI) walked around the Goa Medical College and Hospital (GMC) inspecting it. Surgeries were cancelled and postponed, outpatient departments were closed or functioned minimally and patients were put to hardship. Strangely, as all this happened, the government remained unaware of what was transpiring in the hospital and college. It was only when Herald made inquiries with Deputy Chief Minister Francis D’Souza that he first learnt that services at the GMC had come to a halt and then sought an inquiry. D’Souza is the Health minister and when the State’s only government medical college and tertiary hospital is almost under siege, shouldn’t it be brought to the notice of the minister in charge? This not only indicates a wide and gaping chasm between administration and government but also does not augur well for the State.
Inspections by MCI are important and should be held at regular intervals. Surprise inspections are welcome as these have a bigger impact and can discover inefficiencies that could otherwise be concealed during an inspection whose date has been announced in advance. An institution that is forewarned about an inspection will take care to mask its deficiencies, but this won’t be possible in a surprise inspection. But that these surprise inspections should lead to a closure of all services in the hospital is definitely not acceptable.
A hospital cannot close down at a moment’s notice, and most definitely not for an inspection. The inquiry ordered by the deputy chief minister should ascertain the precise reason for this sudden and uncalled for closure of the GMC. Was this closure of services actually ordered by MCI officials or was it, as some doctors pointed out, the result of panic by the hospital administration? Whatever the reason, some action needs to be taken or at the minimum the State should register its protest with MCI, if it is ascertained that it was the inspection team that caused the closure of services.
It is also difficult to comprehend why MCI officials would ask doctors to produce their original certificates on the same day and that too within a few hours. Nobody, whether they be doctors or any other professionals, carry their original qualification certificates with them. This is not the practice anywhere in the world. And sending doctors home to get the certificates within three hours is almost the kind of punishment that some years back a child in school would be awarded for forgetting to bring a particular book to class. Such punishments have been stopped in schools. Are they being introduced at the level of professionals?
If doctors were inconvenienced these last two days, then patients had a harder time. Imagine the trauma of a person set to undergo surgery going to the GMC after completing all the required tests and taken the prescribed medicines and the preparation only to find that the surgery cannot be performed because of an inspection. Or the distress of a sick person on learning that doctors cannot attend to him or her because there is an inspection on. This is something that happened on these two days at the GMC and most people can surely empathize with those who underwent this ordeal. This should never have happened.
The Health minister and the undersecretary of Health are in agreement on this. It is to his credit that the deputy chief minister reacted quickly to Herald’s queries regarding the trouble at GMC and ordered an inquiry rather than sleeping on it. It would have been far better had he known of what was transpiring at the hospital for that might have eased the trauma caused to the patients that rushed to GMC on those two days seeking treatment and solace but receiving neither.
