More than two years after the father of a 15-year-old girl who died of tuberculosis (TB) filed a complaint of medical negligence against doctors of K.J. Somaiya Hospital in Sion, the case came up for its first hearing at the Maharashtra Medical Council (MMC) on Saturday.
The MMC’s four-member ethical committee gave a period of seven days to both the parties to submit additional documents if any, and the next date of hearing is yet to be decided.
The MMC is the State’s most important quasi-judicial body for patient redressal in cases of medical negligence and violation of patients rights. But with an average wait of one to two years for the hearings to begin, the plight of aggrieved citizens who take on the doctors and medical institutions is pitiable.
“I had lost all hope that the case would come up. Two years is a very long time,” the complainant Kamlesh Singh told The Hindu . Mr. Singh’s daughter Kanu Priya died at the K. J. Somaiya Hospital on May 7, 2016. In his complaint filed on February 10, 2017, he has alleged that the doctors at the hospital hurriedly discharged his daughter as soon as they got to know that she had TB.
“Where else does one go to seek justice? This is the only route,” said Mr. Singh, a resident of Kurla. He had first approached the police who forwarded his case to the J.J. Hospital’s medical negligence committee. Its report is still pending.
700 cases pending
The MMC has four ethical committees consisting of four members each. Hearings are held once a week in the presence of one of these committees.
“We hear about 15 cases in one day, half of them are old cases and half are new. The MMC is like a civil court where each party is given enough scope to put forward their side. We cannot simply expedite the process of hearings,” Dr. Shivkumar Utture, president of the council said.
He said that when the new council was elected in 2017, there was a backlog of nearly 1,400 cases. “In the past one-and-a-half years, we have cleared half of the pending cases,” he said, adding that every year, about 100 to 125 new cases are filed with the council. The main reason behind the huge backlog is a 12-year-long hiatus between 1998 and 2010 when the council was suspended by the High Court due to election irregularities. There was also a delay in forming the council in 2016 which further piled up the cases.
Delay unacceptable
Health activists say that such a huge delay in patient redressal is unacceptable.
“For a long time now, we have been demanding a separate grievance redressal tribunal for such cases,” activist Dr. Abhijit More, co-convenor of Jan Arogya Abhiyan said. According to Dr. More, the MMC is entirely a doctors’ body and thus should not be handling these cases unless there is a provision of 50% non-doctors in the committee.
“The complainants are often intimidated. Also, what is the guarantee of transparency?” he asked adding that the delay in justice can be averted if a dedicated tribunal is formed and equipped to handle cases at a district level.
