Patients cold-shouldered at PGI

Sandeep Rana
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, December 9

Patients are facing trouble due to the alleged mismanagement at the ENT OPD of the PGI.

To ensure doctors do not get disturbed due to “noise” outside their rooms, poor patients, including elderly, are made to stand outside the department. Many of them sit on the floor in this cold weather even as a large number of chairs lie vacant outside doctors’ rooms.

With people forced to crowd outside the department till their names are called out, it leads to blocking of the corridor, causing inconvenience and hindrance to movement of others. “It is sheer mismanagement. I have been standing in the queue for about two hours. They should at least let us enter and sit in the vacant chairs. If there is noise due to people, it does not mean you make us stand outside,” rued Savitri Devi, who had come from Mohali for her husband’s treatment.

These days, OPD staff uses loudspeaker to call out patients waiting outside the department. “On the one hand, a ‘no honking’ drive is under way inside the hospital while on the other, they are using loudspeakers to call out people, causing irritation to patients. If we are noise for doctors, then these loudspeakers are also the same to us,” lamented an attendant, Jaspal Singh, a local resident.

About 300-400 patients visit the ENT OPD daily.

Sources said earlier, patients used to enter inside but a senior doctor complained that it was causing noise and disturbance.

Manju Wadwalkar, official spokesperson, PGI, said, “The problem had its genesis in shifting of the location of the ENT OPD due to ongoing renovation work. If people enter inside, reports of certain sensitive machines get affected due to outside noise.”