Woman dies while waiting for admission slip in DG Khan

Hospital MS says inquiry under way to determine facts

DERA GHAZI KHAN:  

A woman died after waiting for hours in queue to get an admission slip for treatment at a Teaching Hospital in Dera Ghazi Khan. The doctors allegedly refused to treat her over the failure to present the admission slip.

The wife of Abdul Aziz was brought to the emergency ward of the teaching hospital with a complaint of heart pain. The patient hailed from Mozah Jhariwala, a village near Drahma. Instead of administering an immediate checkup, the doctors on duty sent the patient to the OPD department where she was forced to wait in the long queue for two hours to get the admission slip.

As her condition deteriorated, she collapsed on the ground and died. Following the incident, the family held a strong protest against the hospital administration. The hospital administration reportedly hastily shifted her body to her home in an ambulance.

When contacted, Teaching Hospital Medical Superintendent Dr Gul Hassan told The Express Tribune that the administration was carrying out an inquiry into the incident. The deceased woman was accompanying a friend to the hospital and had not come for her own treatment, the MS claimed. He revealed that she died moments after her condition deteriorated.

He maintained that a patient could visit the doctor only after getting an admission slip. “If the woman was in a critical condition, she should have been shifted to the hospital’s emergency instead of the OPD,” he pointed out. However, he said, the hospital administration was carrying out an internal investigation to determine the facts.