Dear JC There are doctors and there are doctors. In Goa some behave like unscrupulous taxi drivers when it comes to charging as our people are easily frightened and believe that their lives are in the hands of doctors who take advantage of this belief. These doctors need to be reminded they are not God and that there is a higher authority that will assist sincere doctors and their assistants who take pride in patient care duties at whatever the nominal rate is. Unlike others who can only see money first regardless of patient care.
My experience of this was when a friend of mine took ill in Goa last year having had lunch at a beach shack in Candolim. To cut a long story short, he had food poisioning. What happened, a Goa government ambulance was called from Mapusa to the residence in Candolim. The ambulance crew was very professional (full marks to them) and took an ECG reading on their antiquated mobile equipment. They then took another ECG reading fitted inside the ambulance which I travelled in and got a more accurate picture. A friend of his stopped the ambulance from proceeding to the Government hospital in Mapusa and we were directed to a private teaching hospital in Candolim. The building looked all professional and we had to sign some paperwork discharging the ambulance crew. There was no cost involved up to this point. At the hospital the doctor and the cardiologist would have frightened anyone with no medical knowledge as their expressions and theatorical performance indicated he was in a critical condition. Food poisioning makes you weak. He was wired up to an antiquated ECG machine that will have been redundant in Europe and we were asked to watch the monitor. Something like the sonar machine from Thunder Birds. He was connected to an oxygen supply that had no oxygen coming out. Had he urgently needed oxygen he would have brain dead. He was also connected to a saline drip that did not work. In the evenings, the nurse came and gave what appeared to be blood thinning injections in the stomach but actually it was just plain water as we discovered on a check up back in the UK. I did ask the nurse in Konkani whether the equipment was for decoration. Her expression was, as with most of our people, dumb founded. The doctor advised that my friend was not fit for travel. We then informed him that we would be travelling anyway and to disconnect all the wired up stuff which continued to stay on all day. By 7pm in the evening, the doctor had gone home. In order words he will have been overcharging on a daily charge rate. I checked my friend's pulse and it seemed normal. Assuming his blood pressure would be okay, unlike tyre pressure or boiler pressure, we made an executive decision, removed all the wired up bits and asked the nurse for the bill. The doctor then turned up from his house next door, phoned the cardiologist for her cut and calculated an extortionate bill for my friend's stay in the hospital. Bearing in mind 24 hour care is available in Goa, a spare bed is provided for relations to keep watch on the patient and they also have to come with home made food that has no bearing on the condition of the patient. Had this been a normal hospital I doubt the issue would be the same. I will be travelling to Goa in December and make it a point to visit the Government hospital in Mapusa so that your question on renumeration can be fully answered. Lessons are learnt but never applied. Perhaps someone in authority can tell us how the Goa health care system works. Whether administrative peon or senior sirs with their administrative skills left over from British India. Where does the local public and visitors address their grievances to in what appears to be an unregulated free for all so called medical care? The insurance companies need to get involved in this matter as this means higher premiums for travel insurance to cover unnecessary costs. NB: An ECG reading should take no more than ten minutes with a print out on graph paper telling the medical technician what the heart rate is. Best regards. Melvyn Fernandes Thornton Heath, Surrey, CR7 8HJ 8 July 2014
