At Delhi’s GTB Hospital, relatives are forced to tend to Covid patients

Among those waiting outside is Vipin Shrivastava. He says his sister has just gone in to tend to her husband, who was admitted to the hospital seven days ago.

Read| Beds to hotels, what Delhi did — and did not get done — during the lockdown

He and his sister spend their days outside, leaving the premises only at night, Shrivastava says. “Food and water are not given to the patients on time. They are not given assistance to go to the toilet either. We are the only ones they can depend on for help.”

At least five other families are similarly waiting, in a small park on the hospital premises, on call to attend to relatives. They say they go in with just masks on for protection.

One of the attendants says that with his mother’s condition worse, she is now in the ICU. “I can say she is getting some treatment there. When she was in the ward, she was neglected, like all the other patients. I had to go to the ward to make sure she was alright, and saw how sloppily she was treated. The staff themselves barely go to the ward to check on patients. We continue to be their caregivers,” the attendant says.

The hospital seems to have few checks to stop people from entering wards with Covid-19 patients, with the handful of guards stopping barely anyone. At the accidents and casualty ward on the ground floor, adjacent to the emergency ward, patients keep streaming in; at times on stretchers with a family member besides them.

GTB’s Medical Superintendent Dr Sunil Kumar denied that family members go into wards to help patients. “We have tight security. No one except patients is allowed,” he said.

A Chief Medical Officer on duty, who refused to share her name, said, “We do not allow any relatives inside the ward, definitely not on my watch. The nursing staff takes care of the needs of patients.”

Read| Explained: What’s behind the mismatch in Delhi’s Covid death figures?

Scared about getting infected, the family members say the hospital has also turned down their requests to test them.

Says Vikas Singh, whose brother was admitted to the hospital eight days ago: “There are five of us at home but none has been tested. The hospital has been telling us to get the tests done at a private clinic. Our home has not been sanitised by the authorities, even though we called the Delhi government’s helpline.”

Singh complains that there is no communication with patients’ families on their status or treatment either. “We go into the hospital to try and check for ourselves,” he says.

Read| ‘Horrendous, horrific, pathetic’: SC censures Delhi govt over handling of dead bodies

Sudhir Kumar says the hospital didn’t give him any update on his 61-year-old father, who was admitted on Sunday night and passed away on Friday afternoon. “He had fever for two days, after which we took him to a private clinic. They turned him away saying he needed to be tested. We came here on Sunday evening and he was admitted that night as a suspected case. After that, there was no communication from the hospital. I don’t even know if he was tested. I tried talking to my father on the phone, but he was not able to speak properly because of breathing difficulty,” says Kumar.