Post-mortems pile up due to hospital strike

At GTB Hospital, since the strike began, only one post-mortem has been conducted. There are four other bodies waiting for the post-mortem, one being that of a murder victim from Seelampur.

This hospital8217;s mortuary is completely deserted with only a clerk on duty. 8220;A post-mortem on the body of the murder victim is yet to be carried out. It has been here since July 20 and the relatives have been desperately trying to get it done but to no avail.8221;

At Safdarjung Hospital there was a padlock on the mortuary door and there was no one on duty this evening. Friends of a resident of Chennai, Rajkamal, who had died in a road accident last night were waiting to claim the body but seemed to have had no success.

8220;We have been waiting here since morning but no one seems to be here to listen to us. His relatives will be arriving from Chennai tomorrow and we want to get his body out before then.8221;

A police Sub-Inspector was also waiting at the mortuary to get his case, a suicide in Rohini, accepted. 8220;They have accepted the body into the mortuary. But there have been no post-mortems here since yesterday.8221;Police said that the delay in conducting the postmortems was affecting the investigations.

8220;They are not accepting the bodies into the hospital and there is no one to receive them since all the karamcharis are on strike,8221; said DCP North S.N. Shrivastav.

8220;Even though the doctors are not on strike, their assistants who help with the post-mortems are. If the bodies are kept too long they putrefy and then any clues on the body which may help the investigations are destroyed,8221; he added.8220;Also the investigations of those cases are being hampered where the post-mortem has been conducted but the reports have not yet been prepared. Many of the cases where the chargesheet has to be filed within a given time of 90 days are being especially effected,8221; Shrivastav said.

He says that right now the bodies are being kept wherever convenient while senior officers are approaching the Medical Superintendents to clear the issue. 8220;This is a recurring problem with us,8221; said Shrivastav. 8220;Things got so bad in the last big strike that we had to keep the bodies in the police stations.8221;

8220;Luckily we haven8217;t had to face such a problem so far because there haven8217;t been any murders or other similar cases in the past few days,8221; said Addl. DCP West S.K. Gautam.

Meanwhile, health employees unions today rejected a government offer to triple the patient care allowance allocated to them. The Director General Health Services Dr S.P. Agarwal made the offer in a meeting with the unions this evening, on the third day of a strike which has crippled services at all Central and Delhi government hospitals in the capital.

The unions had been demanding a patient care allowance equal to 25 per cent of basic salary. The offer to triple the current patient care allowance would still fall far short of their demands, said representatives of employee unions.