People must realise that the quality of treatment suffers if a doctor has to see an unusually high number of patients, a veteran doctor told a conference on patient safety on Saturday.
Paediatrician Apurba Ghosh said the solution to the problem lay in producing more doctors and nurses every year. More healthcare providers would reduce the pressure that now piles up on a few doctors.
Ghosh said the government has to ensure that all medicine stores compulsorily keep a pharmacist who can explain the dosage of medicines based on a doctor’s prescription. In reality, most medicine retailers do not have a pharmacist.
There have been instances where patients have suffered after they consumed the wrong medicine or took it in the wrong dosage, Ghosh said.
“It often happens that patients come to a doctor’s clinic without an appointment or despite being refused one. They arrive and keep pestering so the doctor examines them. The doctor is then under pressure to do so,” said Ghosh, director of the Institute of Child Health.
“What patients fail to realise is that if a doctor has to see an unusually high number of patients in a day, then the time for examination and thinking is lost. A doctor has to think and understand what has happened before writing a prescription. If that time is cut down, the quality of care suffers,” Ghosh said at MediSAFEcon 2023, a conference on patient safety organised by Peerless Hospital.
Another doctor pointed out that unlike in India, where patients approach a specialist doctor in the first instance, people in Western countries have to first visit a general physician.
”If the general physician feels there is a need to consult a specialist, the patient can fix an appointment. The appointment often comes weeks later. In case of an emergency, the patient has to visit a hospital that will seek a specialist,” said the doctor.
Ghosh said: “We are a country with a very large population. We need more doctors and nurses so that too much pressure does not fall on a few. If there are more doctors, patients too will have more options and they will be examined better.”
Despite a push to create more seats in undergraduate and postgraduate medical courses, Bengal still produces fewer doctors than some other Indian states.
Karnataka has more than 10,000 MBBS seats and Maharashtra has about 6,500 MBBS seats. A large number of the seats in both states are in private medical colleges. Bengal has 5,000 MBBS seats.
Subhrojyoti Bhowmick, organising chairman of the conference, said the objective was to discuss how to cut down medication errors. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists and patients were part of the meet.