Sep 13, 2022 10:00 PM
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This is a nightmare of a hospital where my mother lost her battle in the ICU.
My elderly mother who was 5-6 days into COVID developed some new symptoms, and Inamdar was the natural choice given that it was the only nearby hospital admitting COVID patients.
Soon as I reached this place, I was struck by the crude ambience of the screening room – an open-air enclosure with an asbestos roof where my mother spent over an hour waiting to get her blood drawn by attendants who couldn’t find an artery without a struggle. ICU seems to be the immediate solution here to any ailment, and she was wheeled away after I made our advance payment of close of one lac, though she was fully conscious and coherent.
My mother's admitting doctor was waxing eloquent about the 3000-bed COVID facility he ran, which initially got us impressed. In a couple of days, we realized this hospital's ICU was hopelessly mismanaged by an inept coordinator, supported by a horde of younger and inexperienced ICU staff who kept rotating on a constant basis – which made us wonder how would they ever be able to keep track of my mother’s preexisting conditions and medications accurately – an imperative prerequisite to her wellbeing, especially when she was on life support medicines and these would have to be carefully reduced depending on her level of improvement. They have absolutely no customer-facing or social skills, and seemed unable to answer simple questions on the phone. Monitoring the billing department is an added headache—they don’t send you updates on your daily balance and then withhold medicines from the patient when your cash balance runs low—you have to rush to their in-house pharmacy and buy medicines for delivery to the ICU.
The senior doctors at Inamdar(who have taken the Hippocratic Oath) thrive on a famous corporate maxim – maximize revenues and decrease operating costs. The latter is achieved by a series of measures including one which involves turning off all air-conditioning units in public areas, letting visitors sweat their wait outside the ICU. Other measures include not investing in decent screening rooms. Doctors maximize revenues by a series of measures including forcing not-so-sick patients into the ICU(a sickly place), administering unnecessary medicines(my mother was dosed with Remdesivir six days into infection – something we had them stop). They will also scare you into consenting for ventilation and will force this on patients who don’t need them.
My mother recovered from COVID and seemed to be progressing well. I am confident she may have survived this horrible experience had it not been for the utter neglect over the weekend at the hands of the ICU personnel. She was fully conscious and was talking to us just that morning and more lucidly the day before, but some inexplicable events led to her sudden passing that same afternoon probably by uninformed medication decisions made by weekend ICU staff. My brother and I were subjected to the indignity of a junior ICU doctor hastening to declare our mother dead unless we approved CPR and intubation … something we had previously clarified was against our mother’s and our family's wishes. Soon after, the said doctor brought us a flatline EKG to prove her point. No class or empathy. They then kept us waiting for close to two hours as they completed their paperwork.
To date, no one from the doctor team has bothered to call us or even have the courtesy to write us to express their condolences.
Our experience with Ruby last year for her heart condition was a lot better and I am glad we did not admit her at Inamdar at that time – we got to enjoy one year of her company.
On a side note, this 'ghar to grave' package from Inamdar carried a price tag of three lacs. Not that it matters-we would have been willing to pay more for a better facility and a favorable outcome.
We will be escalating this to Inamdar's owner and hope to bring some media attention to bear on the workings of this hospital. Avoid this death trap at all costs.
