July 9, 2008, Calcutta: Software engineer Kuntal Choudhury undergoing chemotherapy dies in a nursing home after being injected in the spine instead of the vein.

July 2,2008, Calcutta: A premature baby born in Belle Vue Clinic is declared dead, only to be found alive after a couple of hours.

June 19,2008, Mumbai: A premature baby declared dead at Sion Hospital is found alive at the time of burial. The doctor has been suspended.

There was a time when doctors were like God — they could do no wrong. Today, just as a consumer demands redress if a new washing machine stops functioning, patients are seeking action against doctors who make mistakes — sometimes fatal ones.

But it is a slow process. Ask Raj Kamal Srivastava, an advocate from Allahabad. In 1997, his two-year-old son fell into a bucket of lime wash, burned his left eye and was rushed to a private hospital for surgery. The doctors operated the healthy right eye and botched things up further when the oxygen cylinder finished midway through the surgery. His son not just lost his vision but also suffered brain damage.

Today, the father — who filed a criminal negligence case against two Allahabad doctors in 2005 — wants justice. “I have to take my 12-year-old paralytic son for physiotherapy, besides going for regular hearings,” he says. He has also filed a civil case at the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission (NCDRC) in Delhi for Rs 64 lakh. “The next hearing at the NCDRC is slated for July 24 and I hope to get some reprieve so that I can lead a normal life.”

In 1995, the Supreme Court brought the patient-doctor relationship under the ambit of the Consumer Protection Act, 1986. A few years ago, the Supreme Court admitted the country’s highest medical compensation case for Rs 144 crore by Dr Kunal Saha, an Ohio-based AIDS researcher whose wife died in 1998 allegedly because of medical negligence in Calcutta. His civil and criminal negligence cases against three Calcutta doctors are now before the Supreme Court.

“The number of medical negligence cases is substantially high after the Supreme Court ruling in 1995. Now suing a doctor is easy as patients do not have to pay anything for a civil case at the consumer forum,” says Dr Narender Saini, Indian Medical Association spokesperson.

VICTIMS: (Top) Kuntal Choudhury, who died recently owing to gross medical negligence. (below) Kunal Saha, who lost his wife allegedly to wrong treatment

Dr Saha’s fight against medical malpractice prompted him to set up People for Better Treatment (PBT), a body that seeks to make doctors accountable for negligence. “The number of formal complaints against doctors in India is far less than that in Western countries because most ordinary people are unaware about their rights. Many of them do not even realise when they fall victims to medical neglect,” says Dr Saha.

Information on how many such cases have been registered is closely guarded by the fraternity. Repeated calls to Dr A.R.N. Setalvad, secretary, Medical Council of India (MCI), elicited no response. “Most often figures are not readily available with the state medical councils,” says Dr Anil Bansal, former president, Delhi Medical Association.

The PBT managed to gather some information from the West Bengal Medical Council (WBMC) — but it could do so only after it filed a petition under the Right to Information Act. After pursuing the case for six months — though the RTI Act rules clearly state that a reply has to be given within 30 days — it found that 401 cases of negligence were registered with the WBMC from 1998 to March 2008.

The council, however, had found only 17 doctors guilty. It suspended 11 doctors for six months and four for a year. One doctor was suspended for three years while the registration of another was cancelled permanently.

“Doesn’t it say it loud and clear that WBMC is trying to protect members of its fraternity? The council has not even bothered to announce the names of the guilty doctors which is a must as per MCI rules,” says Malay Ganguly, general secretary, PBT, Calcutta.

Regulatory bodies, such as the MCI and state councils, constituted to look into matters of negligence have a different story to tell. They maintain that most cases do not constitute medical neglect. “Almost 90 per cent of such cases happen because of lack of communication or error of judgment. Since the patients who visit private hospitals spend enormous amounts of money, they believe that nothing should go wrong,” says Dr Saini.

Doctors argue that medical services can’t be equated with the service industry which promises value for money. “Medical errors are different from other professional errors because we are working on the human body. There is no exact procedure or set formula to reach a conclusion, so errors are bound to happen,” says Dr Saini.

Doctors, many argue, do not work in ideal conditions. Government hospitals are understaffed and face a huge rush of patients. Some private hospitals, critics say, are in a hurry because more patients mean more money. Doctors are also poorly trained, and many, especially those just starting off, are sleep deprived because of long working hours.

Mistakes happen, but what upsets patients are the cover-up attempts by hospitals. The MCI Code of Ethics and Regulations states that if patients or their relatives want medical records, these should be made available to them within 72 hours of the request.

But Ratna Ghosh, a Calcutta school teacher, is still trying to get the medical records of her sister who died in January of septicimia after an operation. Ghosh maintains that it was conducted without her consent and her physically and mentally challenged sister had high blood sugar at the time of the surgery.

“I intend to get a case of medical negligence registered for which I need the records. Despite intervention from the health department in Calcutta, the nursing home has not bothered to hand over the records,” says a distressed Ghosh.

Increasingly, independent organisations are focusing on such issues. “India’s healthcare system is neither patient friendly nor doctor friendly. It is just management friendly,” rues Dr Arun Bal, president, Association for Consumers Action on Safety & Health (Acash). Acash was set up in Mumbai in 1992 and has been working towards addressing health-related consumer issues. It has so far handled 400 medical negligence cases.

“Hospitals should use multimedia devices, pamphlets and other modes of communication to educate patients about surgery complications, post operative care and things that can go wrong,” says Dr Bal.

There is growing unrest among patients too. There have been several cases of frustrated people gheraoing doctors in hospitals where they felt medical help was wanting. Last month, relatives of a patient undergoing an abdominal tubectomy surgery attacked and injured a doctor in a community health centre in Lucknow, alleging medical negligence.

Not surprisingly, governments view such developments with concern.

Earlier this month, the Madhya Pradesh government passed the Doctor’s Protection Bill to safeguard medical personnel from such attacks.

Under the law any such act of violence or threat is a cognisable and non-bailable offence. The Andhra Pradesh government recently passed a similar ordinance.

“We want other states to adopt the same rule. This way at least doctors won’t be scared to treat critically ill patients,” says Mumbai-based Dr Lalit Kapoor, chairman, medico legal cell, Association of Medical Consultants (AMC), a 6,000-member doctors’ body.

Doctors have also started to adopt precautionary methods. Some have insured themselves with a professional indemnity policy wherein any kind of a compensation case will be looked after by the insurance provider.

“A professional indemnity policy is a next-generation policy and the penetration level in India is still low. There is roughly a 10-15 per cent increase every year in the number of doctors taking this policy,” says an ICICI Lombard official on condition of anonymity.

“But many private hospitals are covered by the professional indemnity policy for medical establishments. So a doctor does not have to take an individual policy,” he adds.

Doctors, clearly, are worried. Last year, the Union health ministry suspended a doctor after he left a screw inside the heart of a 75-year-old patient during a cardiac bypass operation. Earlier this month, a local court in Faridkot, Punjab, asked the doctors of a nursing home in Muktsar to pay Rs 10 lakh as compensation to a woman who was partially paralysed and had to have her uterus removed after a botched-up caesarean surgery in 1996.

As one government doctor would like to put it, “To err is human and doctors are no different. Government doctors need to spend more time with each patient and private practitioners should stop worrying about minting money.”

But that, of course, is easier said than done.