HEALTHCARE
Dr Dahar Mohammed in the OPD of the Noolpuzha PHC
IT is a cluster of dwellings in the middle of thriving forests in Kerala’s Wayanad district. A sprinkling of families of the Oorali tribe live here in single-room structures built by the government. Painted yellow and numbered, the dwellings are set apart from each other. From one of the dwellings
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‘Care delivered by local nurses has been transformative’
In southern Rajasthan, faced with dwindling land sizes and disappearing forests, many young tribal men would migrate to cities such as Ahmedabad to work as manual labour, leaving behind women, children and the elderly. In the absence of men and cash, they find it even more difficult to access distant
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‘The poor have the most complicated illnesses’
In 2014, Ashita, my wife, and I moved to the Chinchpada Christian Hospital in Nandurbar district of Maharashtra with our two small children. The hospital was on the verge of closure. We had so many concerns. How would we be able to turn around a small, defunct hospital steeped in
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‘I realized Adivasis can do many interventions themselves’
It was a depressingly cold, wet night in Nalloorkadu, a remote Adivasi village in the lower Kodaikanal hills, accessible only on foot in 1991. I was away from my wife, Mary, an obstetrician trained at Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, and my two little daughters who were in Oddanchatram, 40 km
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‘In community dreaming we found the answers we were looking for’
My wife, Mercy, and I are originally from Kerala. We grew up in Tamil Nadu, trained in Community Health and Maternity Nursing at Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, and then spent over 30 years, from 1993 to 2024, living and working at the Christian Hospital, Bissam Cuttack (CHB), in Rayagada
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‘Nurses should be trained better and get more respect’
NURSES are as important as doctors in delivering healthcare, but look around in India and it may not exactly seem so. From the training of nurses to the roles they should be playing, much remains to be done. The failure to empower them finally weakens the health system as a
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Doctors are most unsafe in ICU and emergency
THE rape and murder of a young woman doctor in the seminar room of R.G. Kar Hospital in Kolkata shocked the nation. But for those who work in hospitals, they have been becoming increasingly unsafe. The R.G. Kar tragedy brought doctors and other health professionals onto the streets to seek
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Hospital basics, that’s what junior doctors are asking for
JUNIOR doctors have called off their agitation in West Bengal on the promise that the state government will hold talks with them on their demands, but right through the Durga Puja festivities they were on hunger strike. It was no small sacrifice which won the hearts of citizens who showed
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In a Kolkata hospital : ‘I can’t give you a glass of water here’
THE resting room in the School of Digestive and Liver Disease at the SSKM Hospital is cramped and grim with broken locks, two beds and a single table. A mattress perched on another two tables serves as a third bed. There is no attached toilet. This is where doctors are
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The way to cure vaginismus is to talk about it
FOR four years a healing programme conducted online has been helping Indian women deal with a little-understood condition called vaginismus which makes them involuntarily freeze when they are at the point of having sex. Like the eye blinks to keep out even a speck of dust, the vagina closes down
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Why have people been dying of rabies across India?
Deaths from rabies caused by dog bites have been taking place in a disaggregated way across the country. In the absence of centrallized information, a reliable number is not available. Based on reports in regional and national newspapers, Civil Society has made a rough count and found that between February this year
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Muzaffarpur hospital gets going with surgeries, chemo
IT is a year since the Homi Bhabha Cancer Hospital and Research Centre opened its prefab doors to patients in Muzaffarpur, bringing specialized care to this small city and its hinterland in Bihar. In the short time since services began at the hospital, 228 major and 683 minor surgeries have
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Blessed is the rural hospital
It’s a dreary morning in May. The news from all over the country is of deaths, cremations and patients trying to find beds in hospitals. In sharp contrast, at Chinchpada, a small village in Maharashtra, a thanksgiving is being held. The occasion is the installation of an oxygen plant at
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Doctors out there
In 1992 a young couple, both doctors, travelled from Madurai in Tamil Nadu to a remote corner of Assam to check out the Makunda Christian Leprosy and General Hospital. They had been told that the hospital needed to be revived, having become defunct 10 years earlier after the missionaries running
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