Docs watch cricket on TV while patients suffer

SRI LANKA: The house officers of Sri Lanka's Karapitiya Teaching Hospital had been watching a ‘live’ cricket match on TV on June 9, without attending to patients, Southern Provincial Councillor, Wijayapala Hettiarchchi, alleged.

Addressing a meeting of the Southern Provincial Council at which the Chiarman, Somawansa Kodagoda presided, he said, a seriously ailing, elderly woman, who is the mother of a journalist, had been admitted to the hospital on Sunday night, but the house officers had been watching a ‘live’ telecast of a cricket match, and shirking their duties by not promptly attending to not only the elderly patient but other patients as well, who had not received any treatment or attention at the time.

When the journalist had inquired whether patients would be attended to, including his mother, the doctors on duty had responded by calling in the police on duty at the Police Post, and had said the journalist had disturbed them and had disrupted them from carrying out their duties, resulting in the police taking the journalist into custody.

Expressing his views further, Councillor Hettiarachchi said the administration at the Karapitiya Teaching Hospital has, over a period of time, failed in effectively discharging its duties.

Commenting on the building and equipment, Hettiarachchi said, while the former is not being maintained as it should be, among the latter, the incinerator is said to be malfunctioning resulting in waste material including polythene being burnt in the open, in the hospital compound, which is a major health hazard.

“The hospital is a place where the sick call over for treatment for a gamut of illnesses and diseases. It should be spotlessly clean and the highest levels of hygiene should be maintained. But this is not the situation at the Karapitiya Teaching Hospital, which is unfortunate.

The administration should be taken to task for not adhering to the expected standards of hygiene and efficiency in the day-to-day operations of the hospital,” Hettiarachchi further said.

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