NEW DELHI: An eight-year-old boy with a
broken arm
was turned away on Monday by two
state-run hospitals
in east Delhi —
Dr Hedgewar Aarogya Sansthan
and
Chacha Nehru Bal Chikitsalaya
, a dedicated paediatric facility. While one hospital claimed it did not have cotton, the other said it had no
orthopaedic doctor
at the time to treat the boy.
The boy’s father, a security guard with a monthly salary of Rs 15,000, had to ultimately take him to a
private hospital
and ended up spending Rs 13,000, including doctor’s consultation fee, which otherwise would have been negligible at a govt hospital.
Aditya Kumar, a Class II student of a MCD primary school in Karkardooma, fell while playing and fractured his left arm on April 1. He was rushed to Hedgewar Hospital’s emergency ward, where doctors referred him to a “higher centre”. On his emergency card, the doctor on duty wrote: “Cotton was not available, patient advised to buy, referred to higher centre for slab application.”
A copy of the emergency card is available with TOI. Thereafter, the school informed the boy’s father, Vinod Kumar. “I then took my son to Chacha Nehru Bal Chikitsalaya, where we were told that no doctor was available as it was already 5.30pm and doctors leave the hospital at 3pm,” Kumar told TOI. Kumar finally got another doctor’s contact details from an acquaintance and took Aditya to his clinic in Krishna Nagar.
The doctor there advised them to go to Chandra Laxmi Hospital in Vaishali Sector 4, where the plaster was finally placed around 12.30am. “Instead of running to yet another govt hospital, we decided to go to a private one as my son was in a lot of pain for several hours,” Kumar, who lives in Karkardooma, said, adding he had to borrow money from his father for the treatment. According to Dr Ritesh Ranjan, casualty in-charge at Hedgewar Hospital, they could not treat the child due to non-availability of cotton.
However, he could not explain the reason, claiming he did not look after purchases or stocks. However, the hospital’s additional medical superintendent, Mirtunjay Kumar, said, “There was some miscommunication as cotton was available in a store but somehow did not reach the emergency ward.” Dr Seema Kapoor, director of Chacha Nehru Bal Chikitsalaya, said they have two orthopaedic consultants at the hospital, who are available from 9am till 4pm. “We have paediatric super-speciality orthopaedic services but they are timebound and tailored. We have requested Delhi govt for additional staff,” she added.
The incident was highlighted by social jurist Ashok Agarwal on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. Speaking to TOI, he said it was “painful that a small child has to suffer because of the system’s incompetence”.
School principal Meenu Jain claimed that this was not the first time when Hedgewar Hospital had refused to provide medical treatment by saying they didn’t have consumables. “We had earlier visited the hospital with a student who needed stitches after injuries and they gave the same reply. We had to take the child to Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital for treatment,” she told TOI.
The incident comes two days after an expert committee formed by Delhi high court pointed to a shortage of medical supplies and staff/ faculty in state-run govt hospitals. The panel recommended that hospitals must have medicine stocks of at least two months in their inventory and at least 15% of all vacant posts should be filled within 30 days.
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