Life hurts a lot more than death! And who can understand this better than Kavita Garg’s family who died at Medanta hospital in Gurgaon after being treated for H1N1 on September 29.
Kavita’s treatment for swine flu began three days after she was admitted to Medanta on September 11. For the first three days, the 40-year-old was being treated for an infection in her body. On September 14, the hospital finally diagnosed her as <g data-gr-id="32">a H1N1</g> positive patient. The patient was a resident of Bhiwani, a small town in Haryana. Incidentally, this was the first swine flu case in the Millennium City in 2015.
What is more shocking apart from the hospital’s medical negligence is the fact that Kavita’s body was handed over to her family after almost 30 hours. The reason — her family had failed to deposit the remaining amount of Rs 2 lakh apart from the Rs 8.25 lakh that had already been paid. The total bill amount was close to Rs 10 lakh.
The delay in the diagnosis may be identified as a gross failure on the part of the hospital. After suffering for 15 days from very high fever, Kavita was declared dead.
“We were almost pushed out of the hospital for not depositing the money on the day of her death. We had asked for a day’s <g data-gr-id="31">time</g> but the hospital authority didn’t listen to us and refused to hand over the body,” <g data-gr-id="24" data-style="color: #3b3b3b; font-size: 11px;">Bajran</g> Garg, uncle of the deceased said.
When Kavita was first brought <g data-gr-id="25">in to</g> Medanta, they had initially refused to treat her and asked the family to take her to AIIMS or Ram Manohar Lohia hospital. But the family refused to do so as she was very unwell and they felt that if this shift was done then matters could get worse for her.
Gurgaon health department denied having any such record of this case. “We haven’t received any information from Medanta regarding the death of a patient due to swine flu. We have already mentioned earlier that we won’t consider any deaths that a private hospital reports, until the samples are tested positive in our laboratory,” Dr Pushpa Bishnoi, PRO of the Gurgaon health department told Millennium Post.