LETTERS: Doctors’ dilemma

This refers to your editorial “Live in Perils” (THT, September 26, Page 8). With inadequate health budgets and medical reforms, there is a crunch in resources, staff and medicines as far as the patient is concerned.

The state has also to reduce the load on medical staff and improve services in its hospitals.

In government hospitals, doctors are overworked and under pressure from politicians who can interfere with medical admission, affecting the doctors’ self-esteem.

The main reasons for patients’ relatives to become violent are doctors  practicing unethically, such as advising expensive, unnecessary radiology, endoscopic or laboratory investigations, delay in attending patient, request of advance payments, or withholding a deceased body until settlement of the final billing.

Medication forces doctors to ask patients to buy medicines from outside, which only makes doctors suspicious in the eyes of the patients. One major issue is the low healthcare literacy among the general public.

There is also a widespread feeling that doctors have simply lost the trust of their patients. The feeling patients should have is that the doctors will only by guided by the patient’s best interests and not their own.

Lack of functioning equipment in hospitals forces doctors to direct patients elsewhere, which also adds to the suspicion of doctors being hand-in-glove with laboratories, when actually the doctors are helpless.

In medicine there are no guarantees and patients can develop complications despite the best efforts of doctors, but someone who has been told to expect a good result can be angry if the outcome is unfavorable.

Vinod C. Dixit, Ahmedabad

Melamchi

Apropos of the news story “Govt told to scrap Budhigandaki deal with Chinese contractor” (THT, September 26, Page 1), is scraping a bad deal with shady contractors good enough?

Shouldn’t we get to the bottom of the deal to find out if any money or other benefits have changed hands? If Brazil can probe and punish two presidents what can stop us from doing so in our country for handing over hurriedly lucrative hydropower and solar power contracts to contractors with colourful past and present?

Why do our politicians and public servants favour shady contractors? Are the birds of the same feathers trying to congregate together? Funny is that this should continue to happen in Nepal.

On your editorial “Missed deadline” (THT, September 8, Page 8) just imagine what President Trump would have done to the contractor for deferring the deadline time and again by 10 years.

Most of us are still skeptical about Melamchi flowing into the Kathmandu Valley by March 2018. There is no guarantee that the contractor who must have known Nepali planners and policymakers inside out will honour his pledge.

Even if it did it is no more a ‘wonder’ that KP Bhattarai made us believe almost two decade ago.

Manohar Shrestha, Kathmandu