The Bangladesh Institute of Research and Rehabilitation for Diabetes, Endocrine and Metabolic Disorders, better known as the Birdem hospital in the capital, is the biggest healthcare facility for diabetic patients in the country.
Established in 1989 in the capital’s Shahbagh, the 700-bed hospital has historically provided free-of-cost medical facilities to millions of diabetes patients from around the country.
However, despite the ever increasing number of patients, the government allocation for the hospital has been declining of late, prompting the authorities to go for austerity measures which have directly affected the services that the hospital provides.
This correspondent found Afroza Begum, a housewife from the older part of the capital, waiting in the
outdoor area of the hospital on an afternoon.
She said she had come to check her blood sugar level. When she came to the hospital at around 7am, she found hundreds more already standing in line in front of her. She had to wait for hours on an empty stomach before she could give the first blood sample. Now she had been waiting for hours again to give the second sample with a full stomach, while the queue kept getting longer every minute.
She alleged that since the number of patients was huge, brokers and a section of employees of the hospital would keep bugging people standing in lines telling them that they could get their tests done quickly for certain payments.
Around 12pm, this correspondent saw a middle-aged man running to and fro inside the hospital. He said he had been trying to get his wife admitted since early morning but had still not succeeded.
He added that the on-duty doctors had said there was no room in the hospital and advised him to wait until one of the beds was empty.
The man alleged that the hospital had been utterly failing to follow the directives of its founder Dr Mohammad Ibrahim, who had once said: “Make sure that no patient dies without treatment in the hospital.”
Sources in the hospital said the hospital had recently been trying to cut down on costs by ensuring strict monitoring and supervision in all kinds of procurement. They informed that the authorities had already cut food costs by Tk3.3m, dialysis cost by Tk7.8m, and syringe procurement cost by Tk4.5m.
When contacted, Birdem Director Brigadier General (retd) Shahidul Haque Mallik claimed that the austerity measures had not been affecting the hospital’s usual services.
He also said they were left with no option but to refer the patients to other hospitals because the number of beds was nowhere near enough to accommodate all the patients that thronged the hospital every day.
A few years ago, the Birdem authorities set up a new diabetes treatment facility for only women and children in the capital’s Shegunbagicha area. But due to a lack of publicity, very few patients go to the new unit.
The Dhaka Tribune has learnt that the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, which used to allocate around Tk230m every year for the Birdem General Hospital six to seven years ago, now disburses as little as Tk140m.
Hospital sources said the facility has been running on budget deficits for a number of years now. In the last completed fiscal year, that is 2012-13, the hospital earned around Tk1.02bn while its expenditure stood at Tk1.20bn.
Since the government started curtailing the allocations a few years back, the hospital has faced a budget deficit of around Tk230m, sources in the hospital said.
Talking to the Dhaka Tribune, a number of officials of the hospital said it spends around Tk400m every year to provide bed rent, all pathological tests, food, insulin and other expensive drugs free of cost to one third of the patients.
They said the budget deficit could be a result of the curtailed government allocation.
Professor Dr Rashid E Mahbub, joint secretary general of the Diabetic Association of Bangladesh (Badas), said after the government announced a pay scale for the sector in 2009, the salaries and wages of the hospital staff increased significantly, which may have led to the budget deficit.
He added that despite being a private hospital, Birdem had been enjoying all the facilities that government hospitals generally enjoyed.
Badas is responsible for distributing the money that the health ministry allocates yearly for diabetes treatment purposes.
The hospital generally gives treatment to an average of about 120 million diabetic patients per year.
