Private ambulance owners and drivers went on strike from Tuesday morning (27 October) to demand permanent parking inside the grounds of Dhaka Medical College Hospital, Nagorik TV reports, leaving patients and their families in severe difficulty.
On Monday morning members of the hospital branch of the private ambulance owners' welfare association formed a human chain inside the hospital's garden gate, demanding permanent parking and fixed fares among other things. The association's general secretary, Md Emon Ali, said that with parking in the grounds stopped, ambulances have to wait on nearby roads, causing traffic jams and drawing traffic cases, and the strike would continue until parking was restored.
The hospital director, Brigadier General A K M Farhad Hossain, said there would be no permanent parking for private ambulances. The hospital is short of space, he said, and the decision is meant to ease patients' hardship, clear the congestion in front of the emergency department and restore order. Ambulances should drop patients and leave, and return when needed. A room in front of the emergency department lent to the association has also been closed and will become a waiting area for patients' relatives. If the strike holds patients hostage, he said, cases will be filed for illegal parking on the road.
The cost of the strike was visible across the hospital. Md Shaheen of Narayanganj said his 70-year-old grandmother, Halima Begum, died in the medicine department of the new building on Tuesday afternoon, and he searched for more than three hours without finding an ambulance to take her body. Mohammad Monir Hossain of Jatrabari could not find one either after his 22-year-old nephew, Md Rasel, died that evening; he said a hospital doctor told them to take the body by van.
Abdul Ahad, who brought his badly injured mother-in-law from Khulna, was referred to the Kidney Hospital but could not find an ambulance from noon onwards. Even government ambulances were not available, he said, and if she could not be moved in time her condition could worsen.
Several hospital staff, speaking anonymously, said many people had taken patients and bodies away since morning in auto-rickshaws, CNG taxis and even pickup vans, and that the director should sit down with the ambulance leaders to settle the matter.
Photo: Dhaka Medical College, A.M.R. / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)
Source: Nagorik TV
Comments
(0)