Behind Uttarakhand HC Rap: For want of specialists, Bageshwar finds trauma centre ‘waste of time’

Bageshwar district hospital (Express photo: Kavita Upadhyay)

In February 2016, 18-month-old Yuvraj was playing on the terrace of his parents’ two-storey house in Uttarakhand’s Bageshwar when he fell to the first floor. He suffered a swollen head and bled from his mouth.

Although the trauma centre of Bageshwar district hospital was 400 m away, his father Jagdish Karki, 31, decided not to “waste time” at the “referral centre” — which is how locals describe the district hospital — and took the child to a “higher centre” in Haldwani, 167 km from Bageshwar. Yuvraj did not survive the seven-hour journey.

The trauma centre, not made fully functional even five years after construction of the centre’s building, has earned the state government a censure from Uttarakhand High Court. Following a warning on November 28 that the court may be “constrained” to stop December salaries of state health department officials if a satisfactory status report was not filed on the trauma centre and blood bank by December 11, the government appointed four specialists, two emergency medical officers and “other paramedical staff” at the centre.

“Road accidents and those of women falling from trees, or over a steep slope while collecting fodder for cows, are commonplace in Bageshwar district,” said Pankaj Pandey, part of the 25-member Nagrik Manch, a people’s collective that had filed the PIL in the high court in April 2016. Quoting from RTI replies, Pandey said the hospital’s blood bank got its licence to operate as one from the Drug Controller General of India only on December 8, having earlier functioned only as a storage unit.

Jagdish and Sunita Karki with daughter Mahi (left). The couple lost their son, Yuvraj. Hurt in a fall, he died on the way to Haldwani, where his parents chose to take him rather than to the trauma centre nearer home. (Express photo: Kavita Upadhyay)

Citing another RTI reply, Nagrik Manch member K C S Khatri said 88 accident cases were registered at the Bageshwar hospital between April 2013 and March 2015, but all these cases were referred to a higher centre either in Almora, 78 km away, or in Haldwani. “The 88 cases are of people who went to the hospital. Many people think it is a waste of time to even approach the hospital,” Khatri said.

As per its own data, between April 2016 and November 2017, the hospital, the only immediate healthcare facility for over 2.6 lakh residents of Bageshwar town and neighbouring villages, referred 90 patients to a “higher centre because of their critical condition” and a nonfunctional trauma centre.

In its ruling, the high court mentioned a “startling revelation” that out of 1,226 sanctioned posts for specialist doctors across government hospitals in the state, 837 were vacant.

Since the Bageshwar trauma centre was non-operational for about five years for lack of specialists, the court said that before completing their tenure “no specialist doctors shall be transferred” from there.

The hospital’s chief medical superintendent, Dr Basant Singh, too blamed dearth of specialists for the situation. “Due to limited resources, we are planning to admit trauma centre patients in the hospital building itself. [In December first week] however, we have started the OPD for surgery, and orthopaedics at the trauma centre. Physiotherapy, plaster room, and X-ray facilities have begun too,” Singh said. Objecting to the hospital’s reputation as a “referral centre”, Singh said, “In the past year, our OPD has attended to over 1 lakh patients.”