Diminishing medical supplies and shortage of life saving drugs combined with instructions to treat only urgent cases reek of govt. apathy
The state of Jammu and Kashmir is moving towards a humanitarian crisis of unimaginable proportions as the curfew enters its fourth week. Ahead of announcing the change in the special constitutional status and the bifurcation of the Jammu and Kashmir state into two union territories, the central government put the state under several communication restrictions, forced a lockdown and a curfew, detained politicians of all shades and silenced any possible dissent.
A fallout of this move has been that the general healthcare in the state has been impacted to a great extent as patients are being turned away from hospitals, hospitals are running out of life saving drugs and operation theatres lie empty. Another serious issue plaguing the state is the refusal of authorities to issue death certificates in order to keep statistics low and give an impression of “normalcy” and overall ‘peaceful situation’.
However, outside the prominent hospitals of cities such as Srinagar, nothing seems to be normal. And one even shudders to think of the situation of rural areas. Outside the Shri Maharaja Hari Singh (SMHS) hospital, Kashmir’s premier trauma center, patients are being turned away and asked to come back once things are “normal”.
Per the international daily, The Independent, the number of surgeries performed on daily basis has gone down by 40 to 60 per cent in majority of the hospitals in Kashmir.
Further, that there has been a shift to focus on emergency services, which doctors say is for averting deaths fearing mass casualties from the ongoing protests against the decision.Reports of patients of hernia, stones in gallbladder and other such issues, being turned away have also surfaced. Patients are being given pain killers as a stopgap measure. Officials have also reported that they have been told to “keep routine surgeries on hold” as there are fears of people getting critical injuries if protests erupt again.
Patients are also being sent home early after receiving primary treatment, leaving them vulnerable to infections. Earlier, on August 22, the online media portal, The Wire had reported about cases of relatives of patients having to travel long distances to buy medicines, since many shops had run short of supplies.
A group of doctors had also urged Indian professional bodies to coordinate with the government to ensure that there were no gaps in service provision.
The response from Indian Medical Association (IMA), however, remained apathetic and myopic and immersed in nationalist agenda. The British medical journal The Lancet had written in its editorial, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi vows that his decision to revoke autonomy will bring prosperity to Kashmir. But first, the people of Kashmir need healing from the deep wounds of this decades-old conflict, not subjugation to further violence and alienation.” To which the IMA had retorted saying that the journal “didn’t have a ‘locus standi’ on the issue.
Kashmir, which receives more than 90 per cent of its medical supplies from India, is also now facing an unprecedented shortage of drugs as a result of the lockdown and has seen an increase in “panic buying”. Arshad Husain Bhat the president of the Kashmir Chemist and Distributors Association told The Independent in an interview, “A patient who would usually buy medicines for one week has bought them for two months”.
“If the supplies are not restored within next few days, we have no option but to shut the chemist shops,” he added. He also highlighted that nearly 3,000 Srinagar capital-based distributors are unable to supply drugs to chemists in Kashmir because of the blockade, adding that the worst hit are diabetic, haemophilia and hypertensive drugs.
A hauntingly disturbing incident of the miscarriage of a baby has also surfaced, where a journalist reports, “The drop in the heartbeat of my sister’s baby couldn’t be communicated, on time, to the senior doctor as the cell phones were dead. My brother told me that the hospital had to send a vehicle to fetch her and when she arrived in the evening, she could only re-confirm that the baby is no more.”
The Independent also reported that hospital staff in Srinagar had received clear verbal instructions from the authorities “to keep admissions related to the clashes to a minimum, and to discharge victims quickly, in order to keep statistics down.”
Importantly, the same report observes that in the cases of unlawful killings such as usage of teargas or other harmful inhalation or pellet injuries etc. either death certificates are not being issued or they don’t reflect the complete picture. For example, in the case of Fehmeeda Bano died because of excessive inhalation of teargas, but her death certificates received after a lot of struggle, says death due to “sudden cardiac pulmonary arrest.”
Omar Salim Akhtar, a Urologist by profession recently had raised concerns over the health crisis that Kashmir is facing. Omar was whisked away by the police minutes after he started speaking to the media for saying that life-saving medicines are running out. The video of the doctor has drawn a lot of attention. Fellow medical professional, Dr Sanjay Nagral’s piece in The Mumbai Mirror on August 28 remembered the young doctor for extraordinary commitment and talent. The poster the young doctor holds aloft in the video says, “This is not a protest but a request.” As he spoke to BBC Urdu he said that he was only trying to “shine” a light on the looming “humanitarian crisis.” Akhtar had drawn attention to the condition of many patients, including cancer patients who missed their dialysis and chemotherapy sessions due to the lockdown.
Regarding patients belonging to a certain economic strata, the doctor had highlighted that the Ayushman Bharat scheme was based on smart cards and due to the ban on internet services that too wasn’t working. “I don’t have data right now that patient mortality has increased. But, it is also true that if a patient who needs dialysis three times a week, and can just afford one, then he can surely die,” said Akhtar.
In one incident, hours after a house caught on fire, the families could not receive any help on dialling 101 as all calls failed. The family, based in Srinagar had rushed to the fire station at Batamaloo in Lal Chowk, some 3.5 kilometres from their house. Roads had been cordoned off and there were stone blockades on others which caused significant delays for the family to be able to reach the police station. By the time, they could receive any help, fire had reached neighbouring houses.
Ten days after the imposition of restrictions, the state’s police chief Dilbagh Singh had boasted that “there has been not a single casualty as a result of clampdown”, and at a more recent press conference government spokesperson Rohit Kansal said he had “no reports” of civilian deaths.