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Many government hospitals in Hyderabad lack security, risking doctor's safety

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Oishani Mojumder    30 August 2019

Doctors across government and private hospitals are insistent for better security measures and increased responsibility due to rising number of incidents of patient’s relatives attacking and manhandling the healthcare staff.Yet, most government hospitals are understaffed when it comes to security guards and do not have the infrastructure to handle such situations.

The lack of alarm systems and CCTV cameras give easy access to the patients to attack the doctors. Many senior doctors feel that such situations can be avoided if doctors have an improved sense of understanding for their patients andshouldn’t treat medicine as a business.

Dr Shravan Kumar of Gandhi Hospital told Express that increasing the number of security guards and such measures will not solve the issue totally. Doctors, especially junior doctors, need to be more compassionate towards their patients. Nowadays, it isa trend because new doctors treat medicine like a business without regard for their patients. Patients must feel safe and not brushed aside by their doctors.

A junior doctor in Niloufer Hospital was recently manhandled by the attendant of an 11-year-old patient for removing the attendant’s bag from the ward bed that was restricting the doctor to perform her duties. This is the second incident in the city in a month. A well-placed source from the hospital said that it was possible to arrest the offendermerely because of the CCTV cameras which caught the incident.

But other hospitals such as Osmania General Hospital, Petlaburj Hospital and Fever Hospital do not have the required number of CCTV cameras or an alarm system, like the one at Niloufer Hospital, to alert the Special Protection Force (SPF) on the premises.SPF is present only in big referral hospitals such as Niloufer, Gandhi and Osmania hospitals.

At Osmania Hospital, it is often witnessedcrowds of patients’ attendants trying to sneak outside food into the in-patient wards which is handled only by a single security guard leading to ugly fights. Srinivas Reddy, security in-charge of Agile Security Forces at Osmania Hospital said that currently they have 118 security guards for the entire hospital including all the three buildings, of which only 15 are female guards. There is requirement for more guards, but, the agreement can be revised once the term of the agreement expires. Hence, they will have to wait for another year to get more security guards.

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