The death of 48 year old Rashida Mohiuddin due to medical negligence is another chapter of the dark saga of our health care sector. The rich can afford to fly abroad for treatment but they can’t afford the time to go when there is an emergency. Unlike other times, recent string of high profile deaths like film star Manna etc, and collective advocacy campaign via web by victim’s families, have kept the issue on the front line.

Hana Shams Ahmed looks at both sides of the debate
Hana Shams Ahmed: Labaid, accident or negligence?
Blog: Lab Aid’s Real Face
Report on legal recourse of medical negligence.

‘The reason is that the law does not support Masum or anyone else’s case and this is a reality for the healthcare in Bangladesh,’ explains Obaidur Rahman, Co-odinator, Legal Advocacy, ASK. ‘Under the existing law, it is impossible for patients and their families to successfully take doctors to task for negligence or oversight.’

According to Obaidur, Masum had in fact approached ASK and they had sent a letter to the civil servants in the health ministry and an enquiry committee led by Dr. Mumtaz Uddin Bhuiyan was also formed to oversee the case. ‘Officially, we do not know if anything has actually been done, as of yet.’

In the eyes of the law, medical negligence typically comes under the ambit of Tort laws, since it is a civil offence as opposed to a criminal offence, says Bangladesh Supreme court lawyer Faustina Periera, in an interview with New Age.

The concept of Tort applies to an act which is a ‘wrong’ or ‘breach of duty’ as distinguished from a crime. The idea is that the doctor has a duty towards a patient who entrusts his health to the doctor’s care with the reasonable expectation that he will get a certain standard of treatment, even though there is no specific contract between them.

The Penal Code in Bangladesh allows a victim of negligence to file a case if the doctor involved did not possess the educational or professional degrees he claimed he had, or if he failed to take the patient’s consent before operating on him, as well as a slew of other fraud scenarios, explains Dr Pereira.

‘The doctor has an escape clause in Section 88 of the penal code which exonerates him from wrongdoing if his act was done in good faith with the patient’s benefit in mind,’ says Pereira. And that escape hatch of ‘good faith’ lets doctors off the hook in many cases, she explains.

Moreover, the concept of a civil offence is intricately related to the idea of whether the law sees the act of administering treatment as a service which a patient is purchasing, and if so, whether there are minimum standards of the quality of this treatment that a doctor has to meet, say legal professionals.

‘The monitoring system that is supposed to ensure that doctors and clinics are up to par are so riddled with corruption that it is surprising the health system works at all,’ says Rahman. ‘We file medical negligence cases under the same act that applies to reckless driving, imagine that,’ he says.

‘We need to enshrine a Consumer Protection Act that will detail the responsibility that a doctor has towards his patient, or any other service provider has towards a consumer,’ says Pereira. ‘Without an umbrella act, victims don’t have faith in the system, and we don’t have the confidence to tell them that they will get justice.’

Like all of us, do you also have an similar experience ?

Press conference done by a few victims in January: