John Wilbert & Vikramaditya
Port Blair, Aug 18: In yet another incident of alleged gross negligence by G B Pant Hospital, a resident of Mahavir Nagar, Prothrapur today died due to non-availability of oxygen cylinders in the ambulance and also at the hospital.
According to reports, Mr. M Selvam, the deceased, was working as Driver in PBMC. He was tested Covid19 positive on August 13 and his medicines arrived only on August 15 but as per reports Oximeter was not provided to him, contrary to the claims made by the Administration that oximeter is given to all corona positive cases.
The person said to be complaining about breathlessness since last 2-3 days but nobody in call centre paid proper attention, today when breathing became extremely difficult family members called an ambulance.
Sadly the ambulance came nearly 40 minutes late and when the ambulance arrived family members were shocked to see that the ambulance was not having oxygen cylinder in it.
Anyhow the patient was taken to the hospital where the patient was kept outside that Corona Ward for nearly 30 minutes during which the patient was said to be struggling for Oxygen support but no doctor of staff attended the patient. Finally the patient breathed last after struggling for sometimes.
Family members alleged that a doctor came to the patient after his death and then he was officially declared dead.
It is learnt that some relatives raised voice against the injustice infornt of the hospital and demanded that the CCTV footage of the hospital must be cross checked and the staff and doctors responsible for this negligence must be punished so that such mistakes are not repeated in future.
In recent past several such cases of serious medical negligence in GB Pant Hospital has come into light and it seems that the Health Department or ANIIMS is struggling to run the hospital.
Million dollar question is that Andaman and Nicobar Islands got nearly seven month time to prepare for Corona Virus Pandemic but sadly now it seems that nothing much has been done. The health department is not at all prepared to handle increasing cases of COVID19 pandemic in Andaman Nicobar Islands.
People are now demanding more and more staff at G B Pant Hospital for better health care and more oxygen cylinders in the ward and proper care of all the COVID19 patients.
People are also demanding that no COVID19 positive patients should be kept in home isolation in fact every patient should be transferred to Covid Care Centers, so that oxygen support can be provided to them immediately during emergency and no one dies due to breathlessness.
To know what went wrong, Andaman Sheekha raised this question with the Secretary Health but she preferred not to reply.
When contacted the Director of Health Services, Dr. Ashok told Andaman Sheekha that all three ambulances for COVID19 duty have oxygen cylinders but as newly recruited staffs were operating the ambulance, this mistake happened.
Whatever might be the excuse, Andaman and Nicobar Islands lost one more Islander to negligence .
