Health Minister Zahid Maleque on Monday warned that disciplinary action would be taken against hospital personnel who do not adequately fulfill their duties.
“The public cannot be deprived of desired services at government hospitals,” he said while addressing civil surgeons, hospital administrators, and health workers from different districts at a workshop held at the conference room of the Directorate General of Health Services in Mohakhali.
The health minister stressed the importance of ensuring that all hospital staff in government hospitals are diligently fulfilling their duties.
“The inability of the hospitals to remain fully clean, control the crowd of people associated with patients, and reduce harassment by touts is mainly due to the negligence in the individual duties of the hospital staff,” he said.
“As a result, the quality of hospital services is not reaching the desired level,” he added.
The minister highlighted the fact that a casual inspection of the hospitals revealed each patient is usually accompanied by three to five visitors, who stay in the hospital even during the night, affecting primary patients' care.
Such circumstances, he said, indicate that the appointed hospital staff and nurses are not effectively engaged in their work. Therefore, patients tend to bring in multiple attendants.
In light of this, Zahid Maleque provided necessary instructions to the workshop's attendees and those participating via live Zoom connection.
He discussed ways to improve service quality, keep the hospitals clean and respectable, reduce the influx of extra visitors by increasing nurses' and doctors' duties, assess how effective current duties are, and more.
Underlining the importance of improving service quality, the health minister said: “At least a million ordinary people come to government hospitals across the country every day for services. Government hospitals have been set up to serve these people from district cities down to union levels. Despite our shortcomings, we have to provide medical services to the people of the country with whatever resources we have. We need to ensure that those who work in the hospitals are properly engaged in their work.”
"Every day, along with praises, people also regularly complain about government health services. While all these complaints may not be true, there must be some truth to them. We have to take people's complaints about the deficit in government services seriously. Alongside keeping government hospitals clean, the quality of health services in all government hospitals needs to be improved," he added.
Zahid Maleque praised Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for giving special attention to the health sector and ensuring that the common people get the right service.
“Therefore, any negligence in healthcare services for the people will not be tolerated,” he warned.
