Shocked by What She Saw, Doctor Fought for Maternal & Child Dignity in a Bihar Hospital
Trigger warning: The story contains mentions of distressing scenes
“It wasn’t the first time I was watching a baby being delivered. But this delivery was definitely the first of its nature. The mother’s cervix was stitched with a needle and thread — the kind one would use for sewing clothes. Soon after, the woman, who I assumed to be a doctor, nurse, or paramedic, picked up the broom lying on the floor and resumed her duty. I was quick to deduce, the hospital sweeper had just performed the delivery.”
Reliving her first day at the Motihari District Hospital in Bihar gives Dr Taru Jindal the chills. Despite being briefed on the incongruities in the state’s healthcare — Bihar was once infamous for its high infant mortality rates; 42 deaths per 1,000 live births before 2020 — the young gynaecologist hadn’t expected the atrocities on the ground to outdo the theoretics to this degree.
AdvertisementWas she having second thoughts about leaving her cushy life in Mumbai in 2014 in exchange for a project in the hinterlands? “Absolutely,” she reminisces. When she applied for the programme — sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and managed on the ground by two NGOs, ‘Care-India’ and ‘Doctors For You’ — the mandate was clear: use your medical prowess to train doctors in maternal care.
But, what Dr Taru hadn’t accounted for was the road to this goal being paved with apathy, callousness, and inefficiency. Her initial months in the Motihari District Hospital textured her understanding of the state’s threadbare healthcare systems.
‘Every norm of hygiene was flouted’
How long is 14 days? For Dr Taru, it seemed to span an eternity. With every passing day, she became more and more repulsed. “I would walk into operation theatres where assistants in banyans (vests) were performing surgery. While the patient lay with the abdomen cut open, the room was crowded with ten to twelve people, the patient’s relatives, watching the surgery.”
Advertisement Doctors wearing banyans performed surgery citing the heat as the reason for the absence of scrubsThe very anatomy of the medical policy framework needed a restructuring. But the number of squalid practices made it tough to decide where to begin. People openly urinated in the Labour Room — “When I’d walk in on them, they would continue unperturbed,” faeces lay around the premises and biomedical waste was dumped outside windows.
Dr Taru recounts being “numbed by this sensory overload”. At every corner she was met with heaps of blood-stained clothes, used syringes with needles dangerously jutting out of them, and placental tissue that lay forgotten.
She shudders remembering the day she stumbled upon a post-mortem table that doubled up as an operation theatre table. “Major abdominal surgeries were sometimes performed in dusty rooms which opened into garbage areas that doubled up as toilets and syringes were washed in water; sterilisation was a foreign concept.”
Advertisement Biomedical waste was dumped In the open outside the hospital windows at the Motihari District HospitalBasic protocol adherence seemed like a fevered delusion. The doctor deduced that years of lackadaisical attitudes had decimated mindsets, culminating in this defunct health........
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