Charity begins at hospitals, after court order

HC directs Trusts to give free treatment for poor in their medical clinics
Jaideep Hardikar.

Fifty-five-year-old Ramdas Masram (name changed) is so poor that he can not
even get himself treated if he has viral fever. He has been turned away even
from the Nagpur Nagrik Sahakari Rugnalaya, a charitable hospital in the past
for being unable to bear the costs of medicines and nursing services.
But, with the Bombay High Court directing all charitable hospitals run by
trusts to provide free treatment to the weaker sections of the society, has
come as good news for Ramdas and others like him, who can now enjoy health
benefits which were previously a far cry.

Hearing a PIL, a division bench of justices R M Lodha and Sharad Bobde has
given indigent patients access to free treatment in charitable hospitals in
Maharashtra, by making it legally obligatory for all charitable trusts to
bear the cost of their treatment and nursing. The HC directive stood true
for all public charitable trusts registered under the provisions of Bombay
Public Trust Act, 1950, which are running hospitals or any other centre for
medical relief with annual expenditure of over Rs5 lakh. They will have to
earmark 10 per cent of the total operational beds for indigent patients and
offer them treatment free of cost, and similarly reserve an additional 10
per cent beds for patients of the weaker section of the society and give
them concession on treatment expenditure.

The court said 2 per cent of the gross billing of all patients (other than
indigent and weaker section patients) should be credited without any
deductions into a special Indigent Patients' Fund (IPF) in these hospitals.
"This is what we are meant for, and we ought to have been doing," says a
consultant doctor at Central India Institute of Medical Sciences (CIIMS), a
reputed hospital also run by a charitable trust. "Unfortunately, the trusts
are not rendering service as was expected but running a profitable
business," he says.

But the benefits and sops offered by the government to the charitable-trusts
for running hospitals are enormous like land and tax exemptions etc. In
fact, the court mooted a scheme for all such charitable hospitals - close to
200 across the state by one estimate. An expert committee constituted by the
high court, while hearing the litigation proposed the scheme, which was
suitably modified by the court. "There are some operational problems in the
scheme," feel some members of the managements that run charitable hospitals.
"They will need to be rectified."

The court observed in their order that the charitable hospitals could use
IPF at their discretion, but would have to provide the non-billable
services, such as nursing, free of cost to the impecunious patients.


URL :
http://digital.dnaindia.com/epapermain.aspx?edorsup=Sup&queryed=7&querypage=14&boxid=30772460&parentid=27662&eddate=11/04/2006
Charity begins at hospitals, after court order