BY : Shabbar Naqvi
No healthcare should be exploitative, considering the scenarios people are going through, even the welfare process is so difficult that applying for it will not be helpful, anyways, a land given on the name of welfare is being used as a business, a 15×15 room being charged at nearly half lac per day, not a hotel room that small goes on this rate, plus the bed charges that are linked with the admitted patient in case of delivery patient whose child will also be charged private, semi private rate on the incubator that too on a donated NICU. The doctors will recommend tests that are mostly not necessary and will encourage the patient to get those done, after getting my baby discharged right after a couple of days his NG Tube got out so I rushed to the Stepdown ward where my baby was shifted after the NICU to ask the staff to help me out putting the NG Tube that I brought with me, they refused to do that and suggested going to the emergency first, pay them 6000 for emergency fee and then whatever they would charge for the procedure which hardly takes a couple of minutes, I requested them to take the charges there and put it as there was no oral feed we could give the baby and they refused even after mentionting that the baby was in nicu for nearly a month and a half and almost a week in the step down ward, so this is humanity and welfare we are talking about.
AKU is very good at a business but what they chose is the highly demandable thing which is healthcare, there are few things in Pakistan which can be considered as a great business, one is healthcare, second is education both on which a nation depends are ran by people who are utilizing welfare and such names on the name of their own interests, now it is such a huge network and web that AKU has become a brand, talk about the cafeterias of parking, charging nearly 300rs for a mineral bottle that costs a 100rs as no one would go out of the premises to buy a water bottle so they will have to pay whatever is demanded, the valet business, they are giving a million rs rent to AKU to operate the valet business as hospital has no interest in offering free valet service if they are actually a welfare hospital, I don’t know what else is there on contractual basis.
Right after publishing the first part I got to hear from many people how they had been treated or their relatives cases, there is a chain of events that I found out while just expressing what I have gone through, similarly an NICU case where a parent was not allowed to meet the baby unless they clear the balance, it is total obvious then in a country like Pakistan where there is nearly no Medical insurance benefits for the tax payers or facilities no one has nearly on an average of 5-10 million to pay to the hospital right away, and it is totally inhumane to do something like that a parent would not be allowed to meet his baby who has been fighting for his life inside the NICU just because they are unable to manage funds, AKUH keeps all the data, there are tests on daily basis, consultant rounds on daily basis on each baby that only the charges are put up in the bill of 5000 to 7,000 in NICU rounds, whatever they do we don’t know all we have to do is to manage an amount totaling to 1-1.5 lacs on daily basis without being able to move the baby somewhere else on LAMA. If AKU is providing services of a certain standard, it should respect and know humanity too, not just exploitation, the case I mentioned was closed on certain grounds where the parent had to file an official complain and recover the baby from the hospital with the help of Police.
There are products that are being made in AKU, in my case a bottle of caffeine which was used for the baby was being charged at 10,000rs from which we were able to give around 7-8 doses roughly, while the same caffeine you can get from the outside without being needed to go to the multiple departments to get it against you MR number, from the outside it costed 980rs and that goes for around 16-18 doses, almost the double amount from what we were getting from AKU, everything from a bottle of water to a medicine and a treatment is being charged at so much exploitation and what not.
