By Suresh Dharur
What happens when a patient dies in a corporate hospital?
A news channel which is on the bottom of the TRP ladder breaks the news with bold letters and a menacing background score: Doctors’ negligence claims a patient’s life!
Caught off-guard, another channel, with an eye on the next week’s TAM ratings, joins with a news flash: Media barred entry into ICU! Unwilling to yield space to its competitors, a leading channel asks its crew to stage a dharna at the hospital premises and before they reach the venue runs the scroll: Journalists and cameramen stage a dharna.
Then follows a flurry of breaking news: 1) Electronic Media Journalists’ association condemns infringement on press freedom.2) Opposition parties flay the private hospital management for its “profit motive”. 3) Statements pour in from opposition parties upholding media freedom. 4) Relatives of the deceased ransack hospital premises, damage furniture and thrash the duty doctors and nurses. 5) Legislators and their supporters descend on the scene, speak to the cameras, hail press freedom and demand action against the management.
Meanwhile, news rooms come alive with debates over the dead patient. Animated discussions take place where seasoned commentators, trade union leaders and senior journalists lament how profit-making private hospitals were responsible for all the ills facing the society. They make a strong pitch for allowing news cameras into operation theatres, ICU wards and earmarking special areas in the hospitals for pitching tents to stage demonstrations.
If you are feverishly surfing the channels, looking for a doctor on any of the panels to know the cause of the patient’s death, you will be disappointed. None of the channels engage a medical expert to tell you what went wrong.
When the hospital authorities issue a bulletin stating that the critically-ill patient died of cardiac arrest, it will be described as a “claim” and, as a rule, mentioned at the end of the news report. And, it will not stand the rigorous scrutiny of the television debates.
