No surgeries at hospitals without ICU: SC

• Hospitals and nursing homes will need to have ICU facility in-house, if they want to perform any kind of surgeries.
• This is the judgement passed by Supreme Court in a 23 years old case where a operation was conducted at a hospital which could not provide ICU facility, and the patient family approached court.

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has said nursing homes without an intensive care unit facility can’t carry out surgeries on a patient as absence of an ICU posed danger to the patient’s life. A bench of Justices Adarsh Kumar Goeland gave the ruling on a petition filed by Bijoy Kumar Sinha who lost his wife due to alleged medical negligence of Dr Biswanath Das who conducted a hysterectomy surgery at Kolkata’s Ashutosh Nursing Home in Kolkata. The nursing home did not have an ICU facility.

The petitioner, Bijoy Kumar Sinha, died while fighting a lengthy 23-year-long litigation over his wife’s death, in consumer forums before his son Soumik pursued the case to get justice for his mother in the Supreme Court.

A bench of Justices Adarsh Kumar Goel and U U Lalit said, “Provisions of the Consumer Protection Act, 1986, are in addition to and not in derogation of any other law. Thus, the Act provides for additional remedies. The authorities under the Act exercise quasi-judicial powers. The award of damages (in the case filed by Sinha) is aimed at bringing about qualitative change in the attitude of service providers.”

The appellant filed a complaint before the State Commission on 16th June, 1994. The appellant’s case was two fold. Firstly, the decision to perform surgery without first controlling blood pressure and hemoglobin amounted to medical negligence. The surgery was not an emergency but a planned one and conducted six months after the disease first surfaced. Secondly, having regard to the forceable complications, the decision to perform surgery at a nursing home which did not have the ICU for post operative needs also amounted to medical negligence.