Coimbatore Government Hospital is being accused of maintaining poor conditions for patients after a video allegedly taken at the hospital shows a woman exposed and crumpled on the floor. The video, which has caused some unrest among the public, also shows a cat sitting beside the woman seeming to lick a wound on her leg.
The hospital, however, has denied that the patient was kept in poor conditions.
The woman had allegedly been admitted to the hospital and was not given a bed, according to witnesses at the hospital. She was undergoing treatment and had apparently passed away without anyone noticing. “She’d been lying on the floor. This cat repeatedly came and seemed to scratch her leg and was pulling her leg also, then only I told the hospital staff to come see her,” according to a woman at the hospital. “Her body was just lying there and the cat was biting her leg. Only after we told them (hospital staff) did they come and take her body away.”
Another man, who accompanied his mother who was admitted at the hospital, says he tried to approach a doctor to complain. “I feel like the hospital wasn’t too concerned about this woman because she had no relatives. I approached one doctor in the hospital, but she didn’t reply properly. I said that my mother is admitted in the hospital too, and what if a similar issue were to happen with her?” he states in the video. In response to his questions, the hospital allegedly told him that “a memo was issued.”
When TNM reached out to the hospital to get inputs, they denied the allegations. “The patient was a destitute woman who does not have anyone else. She was brought to the hospital by some unknown person. We were treating her for a kidney disorder and often times we got to know that she’d pull out the IV line or would just slump onto the floor. She was quite irritable and not very cooperative,” stated Dr Ashokan, “She had a wound on her leg, which was cleaned and dressed on Monday night around 8:30 pm. A while after, around 9 pm, her condition began to deteriorate and she passed around 9:45 pm. After this the apt protocols were followed and her body shifted to the morgue,” said Dr Ashokan.
While it has been alleged that nurses in the hospital are feeding the cats to rid the hospital of a rat infestation, Dr Ashokan, Dean of the Hospital, has denied this claim, “Nurses are not raising any cats here. Some people who are admitted to the hospital and their relatives do feed the cats and that does tend to pose a problem,” he told the media.
He further stated that while there have been several complaints issued to the departments concerned, at the end of the day, the hospital is not a closed compound and that the cats do end up coming back.