Hospital chasers: These families drove hundreds of kilometres to find beds

Hospital chasers: These families drove hundreds of kilometres to find beds

With beds scarce in cities, desperate relatives have been hiring expensive ambulances to take patients to smaller towns, sometimes in another state

Ketaki Desai & Sarfaraz Ahmed | TNN

06.05.2021

Nagpur resident Abhimanyu Pagade, a 22-year-old who works in an IT firm, drove his critically-ill Covid positive father Ramesh Pagade, a vegetable vendor, 460km to Warangal in Telangana in the intervening night of April 7 and 8. “He started having trouble breathing that night and his oxygen saturation was at 71. I tried all the numbers for hospitals in Nagpur and we almost got admission in one also but by the time I came back with the documents, someone else had used contacts to get the bed,” says Abhimanyu. His uncle who lives in Telangana arranged an ICU bed at a private hospital for Ramesh who was transported there in a life-support ambulance. A couple of days later, the Nagpur district administration too had shifted 12 patients to Amravati Super Speciality hospital, 150kms away, as the city faced acute bed shortage.

As Covid envelops most of the country’s big cities, residents are venturing to smaller cities and satellite towns in the hope of getting hospital beds — particularly ICU and ventilator beds. Sometimes, they travel hours in ambulances even when there is no guarantee that a bed awaits them.

Prabhdeep Singh, co-founder and CEO of StanPlus, one of the country’s major players in the ambulance space, says long-distance travel for beds has become increasingly common, particularly in Delhi NCR. “Every day we get phone calls with such requests. Because Delhi has immense capacity shortages, we are getting requests to go to Jhajjar, Panipat, Sonipat and Panchkula in Haryana, and Amritsar in Punjab,” he says, pointing out that this is a reversal of the ways in which healthcare has traditionally worked in India where people from smaller towns flock to big cities in hopes of specialised care. “If Bangalore and Hyderabad go the same way as Delhi, I think we will immediately see people rushing out of big cities,” he adds. In some cases, people also leave in order to go to their hometowns where they have family support.

Delhi-based Mayank Garg got a call from a close friend Rahul last week because his mother’s oxygen was at 85. Garg, who belongs to Bathinda, recommended that they go there. “Rahul convinced his mom, put the oxygen cylinder in the car and the three of us came to Bathinda and got a bed in five minutes. She’s now improving without a ventilator and is maintaining saturation of 95,” says Garg. He was talking to the family member of a patient at the hospital who asked where they had come from, remarking, “First people used to go to Delhi for treatment, now they’re coming to Bathinda.”

Sometimes, even this form of intervention is not enough. Even after trying for three days, Sanju Srivastava, 62, a resident of Jankipuram Extension, could not get a bed in any Covid hospital in Lucknow. The family rushed her to Etawah in a critical condition. “We couldn’t get any beds in a Covid hospital in Lucknow so with the help of a family doctor, we rushed her to a hospital in Etawah but she could not be saved,” says a relative of Srivastava.

People running helplines and Covid support groups have also noticed an uptick in this kind of movement. Vibha Pandey who runs Cases Gurgaon, a volunteer group, says she’s sent people to Pataudi, Rohtak and Sonipat. “Ambulances are charging as much as Rs 70,000 but people pay anything to save a life,” she says. Deepthi Sharma, who helps people get access to beds and other resources in Delhi NCR, recalls getting a phone call from a 10-year-old girl, begging for help to save her mother. “I pleaded with a doctor in Panipat who helped admit her there. She managed to recover.”

While the doctors were not too optimistic about the condition of Abhimanyu’s father, he has made a recovery. Dr Abhijan MPS, pulmonologist at Max Care Hospitals in Warangal, said their aim was to improve him without a ventilator. “Since he came from Nagpur, our responsibility was even greater. He had a very narrow chance but he made it,” says the doctor.

Abhimanyu, whose family is still in Warangal for follow-up treatment, estimates they’ve spent anywhere between Rs 4.5-5 lakh. “All that’s important is that he is okay.”

— With inputs from Pervez Siddiqui