What do you do when you fall sick? Go to the doctor? What if your children live abroad and there’s no one to drive you over? The concept of doctors making house visits seems to be heading towards extinction; so many a resident may actually be asking Santa for a doctor on call this Christmas!
Shila Mukherjee of HB Block was in dire straits recently when her 86-year-old husband took ill. His fever remained well over 100°F for three days and he was so weak that he could barely visit the toilet by himself. “There was no way he could climb down the stairs from our second floor apartment. And I am too frail to support him,” recalled the lady, herself a super senior citizen.
Whichever doctor she called refused to come home and asked her to hire an ambulance and bring him to the chamber. It was too much for her to arrange even as she worried if it was dengue that he was down with. And there was little that her children could do from Bangalore and the US where they are settled.
Finally a relative had to drive over an acquaintance, who happened to be a cancer surgeon at a neighbourhood hospital, to visit and diagnose what turned out to be a simple case of high fever.
It’s worse on Sundays, when patients are unable to find even a doctor’s chamber open to visit. “One Sunday, I was crippled by a stomach ache and my family could just not get hold of a doctor on duty. Phones rang out and clinics asked us to save our problems till the next day,” says Souvik Chakravarti, a resident of BE Block. “Out of desperation we had to call a doctor relative in Mumbai for SOS help!”
But doctors have their reasons for not going over.
Show me the money
“Gone are the days when people became doctors to serve others. Today doctors are hardcore professionals so one cannot expect them to be on call 24x7,” said Dr Adrija Mukherjee, a resident of BB Block who sits at Apollo City Centre and who was attending a seminar at EC Block community hall recently.
The seminar, by EC Block Residents Association, was meant to be a face-to-face discussion between doctors and residents to discuss their complaints. Three doctors had been invited but Mukherjee was the only one to show up. Nonetheless she held fort and batted for both sides.
“You have to realise that doctors have studied long years and want to earn at par with engineers and lawyers. The commute of a house visit takes too much time and deprives them of numerous patients that they could have tended to at their chamber,” she said.
HB Block-based Dr Rajesh Kumar Chel is one of the few doctors who goes out on house visits, besides being attached to four Salt Lake hospitals. He says almost no other doctor is interested in going to homes. “When people enter this profession they do so inspired by the Uttam-Suchitra movie (Saptapadi) and just want to save lives. But a few years down the line and they’re all counting their fees. Patients mean nothing more than numbers to them,” he says.
If Chel asks a junior to do a few house visits on his behalf they say it’s loss-making for them. “They can earn manifold more by doing a 12-hour duty at a hospital. The plight of immobile patients means little to them.” Chel usually takes between Rs 500 and 1,000 for a visit.
Doctors are human too
Just because medicine is a noble profession patients apparently assume that doctors have no right to a life outside the hospital.
“Once a doctor friend was playing volleyball when some people came to tell her about a sick patient. She rushed out of the court but still had to hear snide comments like: ‘Here the patient is dying and there the doctor is playing volleyball’. Do doctors not have the right to relax?” asks Dr Bansari Goswami of IA Block.
Mukherjee, who has worked in the UK, explains the medical system there. “In the UK, doctors have fixed timings. They get weekends and evenings off and will not even take calls off duty. But in India we are overworked. We’re busiest in the evenings as it’s convenient for patients to come after office. We frequently have to tear apart film tickets and rush to attend emergency cases,” she says.
At government hospitals, the patient-doctor ratio is more than 250:1 so no one needs a Sunday more than the doctors there.
Robbed on duty
Dr Nandita Ghosh of FE Block recalls the time her senior went for a late night house visit and was — at gunpoint — asked to sign on a murdered woman’s death certificate. “The doctor somehow convinced the goons he had left his writing pad at home and on the pretext of getting it managed to flee. But he stopped going on house visits thereafter.”
Given the times we live in, Mukherjee says female doctors are scared to visit unknown houses and Goswami knows of cases when doctors have been robbed and beaten after being called on house visits. “If I get an SOS from a close friend I might go over but never if it’s from a stranger,” she says, adding that she knows doctors who get it printed on their prescription pad that they will not tend to emergencies.
Too little to be done
If it’s bad in Salt Lake, it’s bleak in New Town where doctors — reluctant or ready — are few and far between. “One Sunday at 11pm, I got a call from a neighbour saying a lady in our complex was fighting for life,” says Dr Supratik Bhattacharyya, who lives in a New Town co-operative near The Galleria. “Now I’m an endocrinologist and diabetologist. I don’t handle emergencies but on humanitarian grounds I had to go over.”
Goswami and her husband, also a doctor, once came across some people crying on the street because no doctor was ready to visit their nanogenarian grandmother. “The old lady had breathing trouble and my husband was a neurosurgeon. But he went as beggars can’t be choosers.”
“In such cases the doctor has no background, no history about the patient. He also doesn’t have the infrastructure to get tests done. So chances are he’ll have to tell the family to simply hospitalise the patient,” says Bhattacharyya.
Ghosh agrees. “The family should summon their regular doctor in emergencies. Doesn’t he have a responsibility towards his patients?” asks the lady who has made some house visits despite her belief. “Suppose I drop all my work and go over but the patient dies. Neither will I have the heart to ask the family for my fee nor will they be in a state to remember to pay me.”
Chel takes phone calls at night but prefers not to go over to a patient’s house. “It wastes time. Rather, I ask them to wheel the patient to a hospital, get an ECG done and then call me there,” he says.
Solutions at hand
One solution is to call to healthcare at home outfits. But to get their service one has to become a member first. “For emergencies, we take patients to the hospital but for minor ailments we have an arrangement with Dr Bhaskar Banik of CD Block. He does home vists for us in the Salt Lake area,” said Jyotirmoy Mazumdar, senior care manager at Tribeca Care. A Purbachal resident, Mazumdar had himself faced problems finding a doctor to attend to his ailing mother at home and so is aware of the predicament most people face.
Mukherjee, who addressed the EC Block seminar, lays part of the blame on residents. “Are residents in Salt Lake so aloof that they can’t even ask their neighbour to take them to the emergency room?” she asks. “I suggest that every block draws up a list of neighbourhood doctors, along with their specialisations and the days and times when they are available. I’m sure doctors will be happy to help neighbours.”
Almost every doctor The Telegraph Salt Lake spoke to conceded that the doctor-patient relationship is no longer the warm, personal one it used to be. “But that is no reason to depict doctors as demons during the Pujas,” argued Mukherjee.
“When my doctor friends learnt I would be attending a doctor-patient face off at EC Block they advised me to go with police protection. Is this what it’s come to?” Mukherjee demanded. “I urge you to please acknowledge the good doctors around you or else they will all leave the country.”
Have you suffered from lack of medical care at home when needed?
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