Speaker waits hours for ambulance

MUMBAI: Maharashtra assembly speaker Dilip Walse Patil got a first-hand taste of the dismal state of affairs in the medical education and public health departments recently. After he met with a minor accident on December 6, well over three hours passed before he got an ambulance. And as no orthopaedic surgeon was available at the government hospital since it was a Sunday, he was admitted to a private nursing home.If this is the medical attention available to the speaker of the state assembly, one can imagine the fate of ordinary citizens.
On Sunday morning, Walse Patil, a former minister for medical education, was taking a morning stroll in a public garden near his Malabar Hill residence when he fell and injured his left shoulder. The pain was so intense that he couldn't even get up. Finally his friend, who was with him, somehow managed to take him home.
The real nightmare began when his assistant tried to summon an ambulance. After calling nearly every government hospital in the city, the assistant learned that their ambulances were out of order or that the driver was on leave.
Eventually, the assistant managed to get an ambulance from a private hospital, but the crisis wasn't over. Then began the search for an orthopaedic surgeon to treat the VIP. It turned out the orthopaedics professor at Grant Medical College had gone to Pune, while his assistant was on leave for personal reasons. "After a hectic search, we found a private orthopaedic surgeon, and Walse Patil was admitted to a private nursing home under his care. After a thorough investigation the speaker was discharged in the evening,'' a senior official said.
The speaker's experience reflects the crises in the public health and medical education departments. "On one hand, we're drafting a Rs 120-crore upgrade for JJ Hospital and Grant Medical College, and on the other hand, we can provide neither an ambulance nor an orthopaedic surgeon for the assembly speaker. It's high time chief minister Ashok Chavan stepped in to clean up the two departments,'' he said.
The official said not only Grant Medical but all 14 government medical colleges in the state are in poor health because of the casual approach of the bureaucracy. "Twelve colleges lack deans. In most departments, key posts of professors and associate professors have been vacant since anywhere between one and ten years, because of faculty members joining private medical colleges,'' he said.