SHIMLA: As World Hospice and Palliative Care Day comes and goes each year, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and other regions.
Many of them languish to death back homes or others in hospitals as Palliative care programmme remains as a good as a paper work in the state.
The essence of palliative care is comforting the suffering and providing dignity to those facing life-limiting conditions.
These have been listed in the National Programme for Palliative Care.
But it is lost amidst an indifferent and insensitive health system.
While the day should raise awareness and push for change, here it seems only the insurance companies are cashing in.
And patients? In most cases they’re left to languish, huddled in cramped hospital wards, ICUs with no palliative care, no dignity.
Patients battling cancer, organ failures, and neurological diseases, dementia, or in comas—the kind of patients who desperately need compassionate palliative care—are abandoned to suffer.
Be it the health centers like IGMC- Atal Super Specialty Institute, Shimla and GMC Tanda, to name few top centres in Himachal, story is no different.
The state health department and National Health Mission care little for the growing demand for these services.
The patients who should be surrounded by dedicated teams of professionals are instead being tended to by their own helpless attendants who generally have no clues on their appalling conditions
The doctors and nurses, who should be leading the charge, are more concerned with clocking out than offering any semblance of comfort.
“Palliative care? They don’t even tell us what it means here,” said one patient’s relative whose relative languished to death at IGMC Shimla last month.
“We sit by them day and night, with no help, no support. The doctors barely check in, and when they do, it’s all about pushing us to expensive treatments, insurance claims, or paperwork.”
Where is the vision? Where is the compassion? The health authorities in Himachal Pradesh have neither.
These patients, who should be the focus of specialized care, are treated as afterthoughts.
There’s no dedicated palliative care system in place—just the hollow sound of bureaucratic indifference echoing through overcrowded wards when we talk about IGMC or for that matter GMC Tanda, revealed faculty members.
This isn’t just about Himachal. The situation in Uttarakhand, even in PGI Chandigarh is equally grim, said experts
Despite the increased awareness of life-limiting conditions like cancer, HIV/AIDS, and degenerative diseases, the health authorities in both states have failed to establish any sort of coherent, compassionate, or comprehensive care.
The patients are left to wither away, with no comfort, no proper care, and certainly no recognition from the government or medical fraternity.
The reality is shocking: World Palliative and Hospice Care Day remains a formality in these states, a forgotten date on the calendar for health authorities and bureaucrats who couldn’t care less.
In a system where profits take precedence and patient dignity takes a backseat, the vulnerable are left to face the end of their lives in suffering and isolation.
This callous neglect—this gross indifference—must be exposed.
It’s time to demand accountability from the state health departments and the hospitals that continue to let their patients suffer in silence.
If palliative care is truly about quality of life, then what does it say about our health system that it fails so miserably in providing even a shred of dignity?
The Government must do serious soul-searching which talk about robotic surgery and spending so much on Healthcare. But alas, it can't give a shred of dignity to a dying human being.
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