A woman in Uttar Pradesh has accused the authorities of two district hospitals of rejecting her request for an ambulance to take her daughter's body home, PTI reported. The incident follows a series of similar allegations of apathy by health staffers around the country. Imrana said she was forced to spend the night outside the emergency wing of one of the hospitals after ambulance drivers refused to travel to another district.
The child, two-and-a-half-year-old Gulnad, was undergoing treatment at the government-run PL Sharma hospital for a viral fever. She was referred to Lala Lajpat Rai Medical College and Hospital in Meerut after her condition worsened, but was declared ''brought dead" when they reached there. Imrana says the hospital's ambulance drivers refused to take the body to their home in Gauripur as they were not allowed to travel to other districts. She then hired a private ambulance, paying a sum of Rs 200, to take her to the hospital in her district, where she alleges she was denied the service again to take the body home.
She claims to have requested the Gauripur hospital's doctors to intervene, as she could not afford the Rs 2,500 charge for a private ambulance, but to no avail. The next morning, some people present outside the emergency wing pooled in some money to help her hire the private ambulance.
The news agency quoted Meerut's District Magistrate, Jagatraj Tripathi, who said, “This incident has not come to my notice yet. But I will order an investigation into it. Whoever is found guilty will be punished. I will tell the chief medical officer and additional director that these type of incidents should not happen.”
The accusations follow a spate of reports of a similar nature. A few days ago a man had to carry his ailing son on his shoulders from one department to another at a hospital in Kanpur after he was denied a stretcher. The child eventually died. In another incident, a man was forced to carry his wife's body after he was denied a hearse van in Odisha, while another had to carry his seven-year-old's body as the ambulance reportedly left them halfway into the journey home.
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