Dead Cov patients’ kin heckle docs, nurses in PSU hospital

Ranchi: On-duty doctors and nurses at the Central Coalfields Limited’s (CCL) Gandhinagar Hospital in Kanke were allegedly heckled by the relatives of two suspected Covid-19 patients after they died within an hour of being admitted to the hospital’s emergency on Tuesday morning.
Seema Devi (55), a resident of Barka Syal area in Ramgarh, and Arun Kumar (55), an employee of the Ranchi-based Central Mine Planning and Design Institute (CMPDI), were brought to the hospital by their relatives in between 8:30am and 9am on Tuesday. Both of them collapsed and died in the emergency around 9:30am even as doctors tried to revive them by putting them on oxygen support.
The relatives and attendants of the deceased then accused the on-duty doctors of being negligent. “They hurled abuses at us, broke an oxygen concentrator machine, broke other stuff in the emergency and heckled me and the on-duty sisters,” Dr Sanchita Mundle, the on-duty doctor at the time of the incident, told TOI. Besides Mundle, four on-duty nurses received minor injuries in the incident.
Dr DKL Chouhan, the chief medical officer at the hospital, claimed both the patients were brought in an extremely critical condition. “Their oxygen saturation levels were hovering between 30-40%. Plus, they were not tested for Covid-19 before coming to the hospital,” he said. After their deaths, both Seema Devi and Arun Kumar tested positive for Covid-19.
Doctors at the hospital have demanded Jharkhand government’s intervention in the whole incident. They have also sought deployment of CISF personnel from the CCL’s headquarters for their safety. “We understand that the pain of losing a near and dear one is unbearable. But that does not mean the relatives will assault the doctors and break hospital property. The government must intervene,” an official involved with the hospital’s management said.
Gonda Police Station said it is yet to receive a formal complaint from the hospital management. One of the assailants has been identified as Mohit Kumar Rana, a CCL employee at the Ramgarh-based Birsa Coal Project.
Since Seema and Arun tested positive, their corpses were not handed over to the relatives. “We will inform the district administration now. Besides, the relatives of both the deceased disappeared after the incident,” a doctor said.
In another incident, the staff of Medanta Hospital in Irba went on strike on Tuesday morning. They alleged that the hospital management did not admit a Covid-19 patient who was brought in critical condition late on Monday night. The patient was a family member of a hospital staff. When contacted, the hospital’s medical director, Dr Mukhtar did not respond to calls.