Hospital fined 25K for delaying info

Man Files RTI Plea After Death Of Son
TIMES NEWS NETWORK, Gandhinagar: Rasiklal Trivedi is a broken man today. He lost his two-day-old son early last year to what he alleges was the negligence by hospital staff in Dhanera of Banaskantha district. The child died for want of a ventilator facility at the hospital, which is what the hospital authorities admitted in their reply to Trivedi’s query under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. The grieving father wanted to fix responsibility of the tragedy on Shah Ramchand Savrajbhai General Hospital (SRSGH) by filing an RTI query, demanding case papers of his child to know exactly what went wrong and also whether the hospital or the doctors attending on his child were qualified to handle paediatric emergencies. For almost a year, the trust running SRSGH, Dhanera Arogya Samiti, did not allow hospital authorities to provide Trivedi information. After this, the case came up for hearing at the State Information Commission (SIC) on Friday. State chief information commissioner RN Das imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on the Public Information Officer of the hospital for causing an exorbitant delay in providing Trivedi the necessary details. “I wanted to move the court with the documents that I had demanded in my RTI application. I am yet to receive some of the information from the hospital. “The deputy charity commissioner has said he will help me get more information out of the hospital,” says Trivedi. Das had summoned the appellate authority of the regional charity commisionerate on January 10 and later on Friday. Earlier, in public interest, Das requested the commissioner of health of Gujarat to submit a report on whether SRSGH had the requisite qualified staff to handle maternity cases. This has been one of the few cases where the state information commission has sought government intervention. The Indian Medical Association (IMA) in its reply has claimed that Trivedi is mentally “unstable and having some psychiatric problem” and that after the “police gave a clean chit to the doctors”, Trivedi even went to extent of filing complaints against the police for hiding facts and further “filed a judicial case against the judge” who gave a verdict in favour of the doctors. The hospital has only alleged in its reply that Trivedi was asked by the hospital to take his son to another clinic in Palanpur, to which he did not agree.

Publication: Times Of India Ahmedabad; Date:2007 Feb 12; Section:Ahmedabad; Page Number 3 MISTAKE ADMITTED