Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Patient care affected at MCH in capital

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The stalemate at the Thiruvananthapuram Medical College Hospital (MCH) over the delineation of duties of nursing staff and junior doctors continued on Friday. Patient care was affected for the second day, as none took the responsibility of collecting and sending blood/other specimens from wards for lab investigations.

The junior doctors said they had collected and despatched specimens in emergency cases, but in other cases, they had left written instructions for diagnostics, which were ignored by the staff.

The entire top brass of the MCH and Medical Education Service held discussions for over six hours on Friday with junior doctors and the nursing staff and Nursing College authorities to resolve the crisis, but to no avail.

The junior doctors said they had never refused to do routine work, but they were not getting an opportunity to go on rounds with seniors or focus on clinical aspects, as they were bogged down with routine work. In any hospital, it was part of the duties of the nursing staff to collect blood/specimens, do catheterisation, intubation, etc., the doctors said.

The nursing staff maintained that they were overburdened and that at many a time there was only one nurse attending to some 60 to 100 patients in a single ward.

“The issue is a fallout of the overcrowding at the MCH. On a post-admission day, the work load in wards is so high that both the house surgeons as well as the nursing staff are totally stressed out. We are trying to find some alternatives so that the workload is shared between all,” Ramdas Pisharody, Medical College Principal, said.

However, the crux of the issue is the inability of the authorities to utilise available manpower in hospital for patient care duties effectively, said a senior doctor. “The Medical College has at a time over 300 nursing students – B.Sc./M.Sc. nursing and General Nursing students –who should be available for service. We could have run the hospital well with them but they are not available for patient care in wards. The Nursing College authorities maintain that patient care is the responsibility of the salaried nursing staff and that the nursing students are there only for academics,” he said.

The Health Minister herself had issued an order last month that nursing students have to be made available for patient care at the MCH. Following this, the nursing students have been posted as interns under the Nursing Officer in the hospital. But they continue to stay away from patient care and routine jobs in wards and are interested only in learning about ICU training. “We know that the staff nurses have a heavy work load. But they are working on a six-hour shift while the junior doctors are working continuously for 36 hours at a stretch. It is pathetic that we have 300 nursing interns (students) over whom we have no control,” an MCH official said.

The MCH authorities said they would hold another round of discussions with the junior doctors and the Nursing authorities in the hospital and Nursing College.

One alternative that is being considered is to open specimen collection centres in select wards and hire some technical staff through the HDS to collect and despatch samples.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Free legal aid for NoRKs
Farm workers’ welfare fund: bill planned
17 moneylenders booked on charge of kidnapping
IMG in quality improvement mode
Good work has gone unnoticed: Isaac
ESI scheme to cover staff of private schools, hospitals
Selected for awards
Special trains
Crop insurance scheme notified
High-level meet discusses conduct of GKSF
Spirit theft from excise office: one held
ODEPC to go in for mass recruitment to Saudi Arabia
Tributes paid to Michael Jackson
New Milma brand products soon
Campaign against drug abuse
Patient care affected at MCH in capital
Beached whale carcass raises a stink
Mass recruitment to Saudi Arabia
Drug formulary released
CAG finds lapses in State’s finance management
Honour
In Thiruvananthapuram Today

Copyright © 2009, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu