AIIMS

Hey,

I was unfortunate today to make a visit to AIIMS OPD dept. and that too without any references. I am writing what I witnessed and experienced there in 3 hours of my stay there.
To begin with AIIMS is the top research institute in India for Medicine and pampers the best brains that can be found in India to specialise them in advanced medicinal therapies.
The campus itself is built on a huge area and has speciality dept for various kinds of human treatments.The campus also has hostels/mess/lecture hall along with wards & admin blocks. To begin with, being a huge campus, vehicles are allowed inside the campus. But there are no proper indication as to where vehicles should be parked. Moreover, the gurads which are there on the duty do not give directions for parking of vehicle. On top of it,I frequently heard people honking inside the premises and even saw a case where a biker rashly entered wrong side, pressing the horn to its peek just to get past a walking old man.
After parking my car, once you get down, you will not find any direction map of AIIMS pasted or drawn on any road side. You are left on your own to locate where you want to go and reach there. This adds to the chaos and pain of people already suffering in some way.
Going further, OPD requires that you get a form filled and depsited which will result in creating a Medical card for the patient. This card needs to be submitted to the concerned doctor who would be attending the case(which means patient in layman's term). Again for all this, I was left to the goodself of the people/guards/staff to find various alternatives to get my card ready. Once with the card, the person is send this card to the doctor attending your case. Again it is a chance game. The doctor may or may not come on that day or he may be late. If it is your lucky day, he will be in but will be accompanied by 2-4 patients which came along with him when he came in the morning.(These may be known people of doctors/staff/minister/govt official . This has further added to the bureacracy of the institute and for places of new research like AIIMS, bureacracy is AIDS ..a silent killer -> sure death due to a very common disease and no cure ).
Once your card is inside on the doc's desk, you are at the mercy of doctor. Things like sequential number , order of submitting of card or seriousness of patient in observation are all trivial and ancient forms of organising. The brainy docs have there own algorithms to shortlist people before calling them for diagnosis and treatment. To me(being a computer prof) it can be described as random and probably to one who has been visiting these places more often, it may be termed as biased.

For me, i had submitted the form at around 8:25 AM and was probably 3-4 th person to submit the form and my name was not called till 10:20 AM (that too after people who submitted there cards after me were called and treated ). This was when I decided that I will not tolerating it any further and decided to move out. In retrospection, I feel that I should have rather talked to the great brain sitting inside ,trying to get some information as to how the thing works and what is the order on which the patients name are called.

I sincerely hope that no one need to go to places like these which are meant to be center of public services but are actually centered against serving public.

One thing I also witnessed here was
"Democracy is something where in everyone feels that he is the king without actually giving the throne to anyone"

this may be my last note in 2006
Wish you Happy and Prosperous New Year

Njoy maadi