NT NETWORK
PANAJI
If you can yield some influence then you can be sure that you will be treated first at the Goa Medical College and Hospital. While thousands of people visit the hospital everyday many exercise the power of knowing someone at the GMC to jump the queue and get treated before others.
Speaking to patients at the GMC one can with certainty state that political or goodwill influence by prominent people of the Goan society will ensure a speedy treatment at the hospital.
In one such case, a five-year-old child of a self-employed person needed to undergo an operation to remove an unusual growth on the collar bone. In a private hospital the operation would have incurred around Rs 30,000, and therefore the GMC was the only option, the person stated.
As he waited to know when the operation could be performed on the child, it was a senior resident doctor, a customer of the person, who came to the child’s rescue and the operation was scheduled the next day.
The man said, “The hospital is good, but if you know someone at the GMC then one can get his work done quickly. Or else you will have to wait.”
A relative of another patient, who has been admitted at the GMC after a recent accident, said that while the doctors attend on patients considering their social position, it required the patients to yield his influence on nursing staff and attendants to get a clean set of linen and bedding.
The doctors admitted that influence works and that yielding leverage has become an accepted norm at the hospital.
A former senior resident doctor at the GMC said that though influence is unavoidable, all patients receive treatment and nobody is ignored; the patient should receive treatment under the standard medical procedures.
He stated, “Influence works everywhere even when you don’t intend to show and exploit your position. With us the influence leads to keeping a track of the patient by a senior doctor or operating upon someone only by a senior instead of a junior.”
Contradicting the claim, a senior doctor and department head said that if influence was the only way then the 25 per cent of the patients treated at the GMC wouldn’t have been patients from neighbouring states.
Every patient at the GMC is treated with the same scale and therefore people prefer to come to the GMC, he added.
However, he added that “most of the doctors are overworked and due to fatigue there could be instances when a patient feels he has been given less importance. But the truth is that everyone is treated equally.”