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Time to lift health's 'veil of secrecy'

Zafar Bhat. Dated: 2/22/2018 11:03:44 AM

Zafar Bhat
Jammu, Feb 21
Unfortunately, from the shortage of doctors and paramedics to lack of resources, the government hospitals represent a sorry state of affairs. Despite billions having been invested in the sector since 2005, the system is falling apart as a majority of the patients are forced to travel outside the state for specialist treatment.
Therefore, the overall health scenario of the State is crying for proper planning and management. The government ought to embolden those wanting to lift the "veil of secrecy" that surrounds public and private hospitals, clinicians and our own personal health data. All complications should count: Using our data to make hospitals safer, health data show that one in nine patients suffers a complication.
It is argued that the government's narrow definition of "preventable" adverse events ignores the vast majority of complication rates, distorts the data and lulls some hospitals into a damaging sense of complacency.
Even more startling is the revelation that there's an unnamed hospital, somewhere in J&K, where one in every six patients suffers a complication, but we are not allowed to know where it is. Unbelievably, neither the doctors nor patients at this particular hospital know about its poor standing. In fact, none of the hospital safety data currently collected by state and territory governments identifies and benchmarks individual hospitals and doctors, nor is it shared with patients and the wider public.
Many times people have called for the health ministers and governments to overhaul data gathering practices, giving patients access to complication rates for different hospitals and different procedures, so they – and their GPs – can make better-informed decisions about how and where they are treated.
The current strategy obfuscates the real issues: institutional responsibility, clinician responsibility and the overall responsibility for patient wellbeing.