“Don’t slip your book into the bottom of the stack! Keep it on the top and wait patiently for your turn,” screams the overseer, a matronly-looking lady. The man, who looks as sheepish as a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, follows her instruction meekly. And then, as he proceeds to take his seat in the waiting hall for patients consulting a vascular surgeon at the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, there is a hum of disapproval. It comes from the other patients who are waiting for what seems an aeon to them, after placing their medical record books in the proper order.
It is around 10 a.m. on a Monday and the corridor of this outpatient ward is overflowing with patients. Most of the patients are accompanied by friends and relatives. Many of the patients are visibly ill.
A noisy room
With its high decibel level, the registration room for patients of the vascular surgeon could make a kindergarten classroom look like a silence retreat programme.
As there aren’t adequate chairs, many are standing or leaning against the furniture stacked on one side of the room. With visible injuries, some are groaning in pain.
Of the six fans in the room, two aren’t working today.
Tedious work
M. S. Sampath, a record-clerk, is sitting in a chair placed in front of a table that is piled high with two stacks of 100-page notebooks (read medical record books). Making matters worse from him, over half-a-dozen impatient patients/ relatives are crowding around him.
Sampath has to review each of these books on a first-come-first-serve-basis, jot down details about the patient on a sheet of paper and put a seal on the book. This procedure has to be repeated for each other patient, before he/she could meet the doctor.
For patients who are consulting the surgeon for the first time, he has to insert a carbon sheet in the record book. Attending to each record book takes two to three minutes, but sometimes longer, especially if the patient has only sketchy details about his problem and its treatment so far.
The key player
The record clerk is the centre of attention.
He becomes an object of glares when he is attending to a call on his mobile phone or when he seems to be taking a tad longer to clear the record of a patient groaning in pain.
“Sometimes, I also have requests from a doctor; so, I have to attend to those records first,” says Sampath, adding that work on Mondays are utterly manic.
“I would have cleared over 100 medical record books in two hours.”
Every major department at the GH has a separate section where the record clerk has to verify the medical records before sending the patient to the doctor.
“You have patients coming from the outskirts of the city for consultation and treatment. For people working on the other side of the counter, it’s about putting up with long working hours and long queues,” says S. Vedavalli, a senior nurse. To illustrate the point, she waves in the direction of the corridor outside the Department of Medical Oncology and Department of Urology that has a long queue of patients.
According to a report in The Hindu , computerisation of records and processes at various department, including issuing of OP chit, was first initiated in 2007.
Although this has reduced waiting time considerably, the technology has to be extended further, say visitors to the hospital.
