Ranchi women avoid clinical tests, all-men sonography centres to blame for this

RANCHI: Ananya Dasgupta, a corporate communications manager in a Delhi-based mobile company, prefers to undergo medical check-ups in the national capital instead of her hometown Ranchi. She had an uneasy experience as a teenager here when she had to visit an x-ray clinic, which was manned only by male technicians.
She is not the only person to to have faced embarrassment because of an acute dearth of women medical experts in general and paramedical staff in particular.Shahnaz, another resident of the city, refused to undergo ultrasonography (USG) at a prominent private hospital here when she found out that the doctor and his assistants were men.
The former national vice-president of the Indian Medical Association, Ajay Kumar, said till a few years ago even the department of gynaecology and obstetrics was dominated by male doctors. "Not only government hospitals, even prominent private medical colleges and hospitals have male gynaecologists till date."
Citing examples of the Sikkim Manipal University of Medical Sciences, where the department of gynaecology is headed by a male doctor, he said problems and complaints of patients emerge in the Hindi belt where people seek modern medical facilities but are not ready to do away with tradition.
Women, however, argued that healthcare centres dominated by men not only cause embarrassment, but also harassment. Shalini Kumar, who works for a local NGO dealing in women's rights, said, "Women are often subjected to harassment in the name of medical investigation. We understand that it is not possible to have a separate system for women but the issue needs to be addressed by the government and private medical institutions," she said.
Rachit Bhushan, a doctor with Apollo Hospital here, said in their hospital male gynaecologists and radiology experts are usually assisted by nurses. "It is to save our own skin that we prefer to have at least two women staff in the room where medical investigations are being carried out because the doctor could be in danger of being charged with misbehaviour," he said.
He admitted that in rural pockets, where there is a dearth of nurses and women paramedical staff, doctors have to often ask women patients to call their family members. He felt urban clinics urgently needed women paramedical staff.
Sometimes the complaint is community-specific and doctors run the risk of being manhandled. One doctor with a city-based nursing home shared his experience where the husband of a pregnant woman was enraged to learn that a male doctor was conducting the USG test. "I would have been beaten black and blue that day had it not been for some senior family members of the patient," he said, adding that since then he makes it a point to inform the husband before sending a patient for USG.