An Assam-based trust observed Anti-Medical Terrorism Day with a candlelight demonstration in Guwahati and Sivasagar town on Wednesday evening.
Scores turned up for the solemn event to mark the death of Guwahati-based educator Anamika Ray due to medical negligence at a hospital in New Delhi in 2015.
The Dr Anamika Ray Memorial Trust wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to create a separate law for better and transparent healthcare services in India.
“The trust has been observing July 19 as a day against medical terrorism to highlight the horrors experienced in hospitals without doctors being held accountable for mistakes that take lives,” Ankuran Dutta, the trust’s managing trustee, said.
Ray, Dutta’s wife, died on July 19 two years ago at a hospital in Delhi’s Rohini. She was shifted there after a gall bladder surgery at a hospital in Pitampura on July 17 led to complications.
Based on a complaint, the disciplinary committee of Delhi Medical Council had last month found two doctors – Chandan Kumar Deka and Abhijit Khaund – guilty of medical negligence and sought removal of their names from the state (Delhi) medical register.
“After Patients’ Rights Day on June 25, a group of victims of medical negligence and their supporters have initiated the ‘stop medical terrorism’ movement with the trust as a platform,” Dutta, who is head of Gauhati University’s communication and journalism department, said.
{{/usCountry}}“After Patients’ Rights Day on June 25, a group of victims of medical negligence and their supporters have initiated the ‘stop medical terrorism’ movement with the trust as a platform,” Dutta, who is head of Gauhati University’s communication and journalism department, said.
{{/usCountry}}The issue of medical terrorism was last year discussed at the 32nd general session of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in Geneva by an NGO named Prahar.
According to the trust, about 52 lakh medical injury cases are recorded across India, and 98,000 of the victims lose their lives every year. Medical negligence costs India about 30 lakh years of healthy life, it said.
On Wednesday, the trust released a memorandum listing 10 demands for improving the country’s healthcare service and ensuring transparency.
The demands include CCTV surveillance in the hospital premises, intensive care unit monitoring facility, recording of surgery, prompt action towards negligence issues, prevention of nexus between hospitals, doctors and pathological laboratories, prescription of generic medicine, incorporation of a course on medical ethics, and development of record-keeping mechanism on the cases pertaining to medical error and negligence.