LAPSES IN MEDICAL PRACTICE

Brig (Dr.) Sharma Surinder Mohan (Retd)*

ABSTRACT

With explosive increase of population in India, the number of patients too have increased accordingly in both rural and urban areas. To meet this challenge of increasing number of patients in our country large number of hospitals both in public and private sectors have come up. The urban areas particularly in Metro cities have world class hospitals, superspeciality centers, state of the art diagnostic centres and numerous clinics with availability of well trained doctors and high quality services of diverse kind of alternate systems of treatment. However, rural areas due to vast expanse of land and spread out population over long distances lag far behind in health care facilities all over India.The system of medical treatment which is most sought after and popular with masses is the modern evidence based system of treatment famously named as allopathic system. As a natural consequence of increasing demand on health care services and hospitals there has been increase in number of surgical operations, procedures, invasive and non invasive investigations accompnied by heavy workload on OPD services. The last three decades have witnessed great revolution in advancement and application of newer technologies towards diagnosis and treatment of diseases which remained untreated and undiagnosed to a large extent in bygone era. The evolution of definitive, focused and ultra modern state of the art diagnostic and therapeutic instrumentation has made the management of complicated diseases easy and affordable. With coming age of advancement in modern techniques in treating patients with newer kind of high tech gadgetry on the scene both for diagnostic and therapeutic aspects has totally changed the outlook and methodology to Himalayan heights which are available not only in large cities but has outreached to smaller towns as well. Therefore as a result of heavy work load of patients on the hospitals and health care services, lapses within hospitals from entry till finality of treatment do come up and draw public attention. The lapses in hospital treatment donot pertain only to actions of doctors and health care staff but also occur due to the mistakes, attitude, behavior of paramedic staff, adminstrative apparatus and inadequate role of pre- hospital preventive and socio-adminstrative aspects of circumstances leading to ill health.

Keywords: Medical lapses, Medical negligence, Public administration, Professional incomperence, Ethics in medical practice, Health Services, Complications of surgery, Fake drugs.