A man and woman were made to share a stretcher while being wheeled to the X-Ray room at a state-run hospital in Madhya Pradesh's Indore, NDTV reported on Thursday.
The female patient Sangeeta, a resident of Pandhana in Khandwa district, was admitted in Maharaja Yeshwantrao Hospital 12 days back, on account of a broken leg.
"My wife Sangeeta was admitted to the orthopaedic ward. Citing a shortage of stretcher, she was taken for some medical examination with a male patient. We were helpless as we wanted to get our patient treated due to which we became ready to allow her and the male patient on the same bed," the report quoted her husband, Dharmendra, as saying.
Sangeeta said that the arrangement was as per the instructions of the doctor. Her husband also claimed that the doctor on duty demanded that they visit him only during business hours, after which he will not extend any services, according to the report.
After a video of the incident went viral, the hospital's medical superintendent PS Thakur has served a show-cause notice to the on-duty staff, including doctors, nurses and ward boys, promising strict action.
However, Thakur also admitted to a shortage of stretchers and other facilities at the hospital, despite being one of the largest state-run hospitals in Madhya Pradesh.
In a recently released report by the NITI Aayog, Madhya Pradesh came out as one the poorest-performing big states with regard to medical infrastructure and facilities in the country. The state ranked 18, with only Odisha, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh faring worse.
In other such cases of medical negligence in the state, last week an attendant at a government medical college in Jabalpur dragged a patient to the X-ray room on a bedsheet.
Moreover, early last month, an elderly man spent a whole night inside the mortuary of a government hospital in the town of Bina after being declared dead. When his body was taken out the following day for a post-mortem, he was found to be alive and breathing. He died later the same day.
