In a streak of unfortunate crises, a lot of my family members and friends had to be hospitalised with various health emergencies recently, in all kinds of upscale to medium-range hospital facilities in Dhaka.
The experience of running around to deal with the urgency of their medical condition brought me to my current realisation.
Before I share my thoughts on hospital care in Dhaka and our ability to access personalised and exclusive healthcare, I would like to state that I have no bias against boutique hospitals, government hospitals, or mid-range hospital facilities in Dhaka or its outskirts.
I am not discussing their treatment strategies, nor am I commenting on the healthcare industry as a whole. I am simply acknowledging their effort for prioritising hygiene and aesthetics when building the hospital structures, for offering a wide range of general and niche medical services, for the hospital amenities, and importantly, for their relentless patience in attending to our inane complaints.
I say this because on the far end of concierge facilities is a scary experience I once had in a post-operative ward, where the bed had splattered blood marks on the mattress, which was without a proper bed sheet. Believe it or not, cats were roaming freely in the post-operative room!
It was my misfortune to land there in an unavoidable health emergency with someone I love, thus my review on how far the hospital care industry has flourished in Dhaka.
Having experienced both the north pole and south pole of hospital facilities in Dhaka, I have set my mind on an affordable health facility, simply because the specialised doctors and experts in private hospitals all have a day job at the government institutions.
This means we get diagnosed by the best in town, with only a token fee in the state-run hospital facilities.
Recently, a friend travelled to Singapore for surgery for a rare and aggressive cancer, at a cost so enormous it exhausted her finances. Coming back to Dhaka, she went to a private hospital for some discomfort; the bill there almost took her to the grave -- again.
“I was admitted to a hospital for observation. I found their customer care very amiable, the nursing staff efficient, the food decent, and the cost of my airy room all impressive,” says a friend, who is a consultant in a publishing house.
“If I am to think about how much the bill is spiking every hour with each test and diagnosis done, each expert opinion given, then the recovery becomes taxing. Whenever I am in a hospital, regardless of its ratings, I have a nagging feeling about the financial burden I have put my family under and on my savings. The service, if I compare, between the city's boutique hospitals and ordinary ones, I would say that the difference is solely financial, with or without the hospital’s cleanliness fanfare,” she adds.
Then again, for many, it is not about money. I was struggling to put my old caretaker, who has dementia, in an old home facility. There is no hospice, rest home, or nursing home for the toiling mass of Dhaka, and hospital bills for them can lead to selling their poor family’s arable lands.
I don’t know how many of you have seen the affordable hospitals’ corridors teeming with patients and attendants.
The bottom line is that the cost for a clean hospital, good care, and amiable service is directly proportional to our savings account. So, my simple conclusion is that state-run hospitals should be visited by more patients, allowing them to earn enough to care for both people and the hospital’s upkeep.
