Pakistan's Killer Hospitals

Thanks to Imanae’s parents, one aspect of Pakistan’s sick national life has come to light. What about the rot in the entire system?

Early this year, an elderly man was admitted to Al Shifa International, an elite hospital in the Pakistani capital and one of the most expensive in Pakistan.

The man had a heart attack and his age -- approximately 90 -- did not permit a bypass surgery. Yet the hospital management tried to initiate surgery. At one point, the management tried to do it behind his family's back, moving him to the operation theater. He was saved when a family friend on the staff telephoned the elderly man's family at midnight to warn them. They lived a couple of blocks away and rushed to save him.

The hospital was trying to inflate the bill.

Two of of the old patient's children were practicing doctors, one serving in the United States and the other one in Saudi Arabia, in addition to a son in law, a Dutch citizen, who was also a doctor. All of them agreed their elderly patient did not require a bypass. They couldn’t believe the highly paid doctors employed by the elite hospital did not know what they knew.

In 2007, an 80-year-old man and a heart patient came to the same hospital's outdoor patient's department for a minor checkup. He was supposed to leave in a couple of hours but left the hospital dead three days later because a nurse mistakenly gave him a high potency sedative. The old man's heart couldn't take it.

The suspicion is that he was deliberately administered the sedative to prolong his hospital stay and eventually the final bill. Otherwise, who gives a sedative overdose to an 85-year-old heart patient?

Such blunders are common and there is no law to protect patients. Every month or so there is a story on TV about relatives of a dead patient protesting fatal treatment on the part of doctors. These incidents are more common in privately-owned hospitals, and especially in the few elitist ones owned and operated by groups of investors.

For example, Al Shifa International in Islamabad is well known as ‘The Killer Hospital … where your loved ones can be killed for money!’. This is not an exaggeration. There is a website dedicated for this [Check http://shifa-hospital-islamabad.com/].

The latest is the case of 3-year-old Imanae Malik [http://www.imanae.co.uk/], an only child who was taken to another elitist hospital, Doctor's Hospital, in Lahore for a minor hand burn but she died because of a tranquilizer overdose. The doctor on duty was not even a full children's doctor but a trainee.

For-profit hospitals are common worldwide. But in Pakistan, the for-profit part trumps everything else, literally.

‘Cheap’ doctors and nurses are hired because money is the number one consideration because the management is answerable to a group of investors who in turn are answerable to no one.

Health department officials in the federal and provincial government are corrupt and easily bribed.

The politicians are corrupt, untrained, uneducated and uninterested. Pakistan is afflicted by a failed form of democracy that has been taken over by ethnic and religious politics where nothing of public good can be done. The political elite keeps its money and homes outside Pakistan, mostly UK and Dubai, and sees Pakistan as a place to make easy money through corruption.

Recently, documents released by the government show that almost the entire ruling elite - politicians, feudal lords, businessmen, bureaucrats and some military officers -- have been jointly stealing from Pakistani banks with impunity over the years.

Thanks to the courageous parents of Imanae, one aspect of the sick Pakistani national life has come to light.

But no one is expected to touch the rich owners of these hospitals. This is one of those things that will linger until there is a bloody revolution here, or a benevolent dictator who will sort out the mess while executing the corrupt. You see, Pakistan stands at a point where it can learn more from Iran and China and Putin’s Russia than from the US and the UK or Europe.