On 10 Feb, staggering negligence was sited in a hospital in Chhatarpur District. Finding a doctor’s chamber empty, a mental patient entered the chamber, sat on his chair and started writing prescriptions to the patients. The man pretended to be Dr. Veer Bahadur from AIIMS Hospital.
The chamber number 20 was appointed to Dr. Himanshu Batham, but during that time his duty was assigned in Post-mortem House. Unaware of the blunder, patients also saw him like a real doctor. According to people, they couldn’t suspect if anything was wrong with him with the way he examined and wrote medicines for them. Also, he wrote prescriptions for more than a dozen patients.
The whole situation came in light when patients started going to medical store of the hospital to get the prescribed medicines. Anup Shukla, an employee in hospital’s medical store, grew suspicious of the strange prescriptions written in red ink and went to found out the story behind. The moment he reached the chamber he figured that instead of the doctor, a mental patient was sitting in the chair and treating patients. He immediately ran to call senior officials and security.
After the disclosure of this situation, he was removed from the room. Dr. Tripathi, Civil surgeon, said that he interacted with the man and his identity is still not known. During the conversation, he realized that the man needed urgent psychiatry treatment. So, he wrote him a prescription instead of just throwing him out of the hospital.
Later, when the mental patient was asked why he pretended to be a doctor, he responded that the OPD was flooded with patients and they seemed upset for not getting treatment. So, he came to the conclusion of treating them.
