Pottering around PGI

Pottering around PGI
by Punam Khaira Sidhu

I stand for ever in a queue. But at the end of it, I know, I will have access to the finest medical care in the country. I could jump the queue thanks to doctor friends. So why don’t I, I am often asked by an irrate spouse.

Let me encapsulate it by saying that I like pottering around the PGI. It’s gratifying, as an individual, to see that in a sifarish-driven country such as ours, there is an establishment that honours queues. It’s inspiring, seeing doctors examining diverse patients ranging from migrant labourers from Uttaranchal to the UT Administrator himself, without letting the difference impact their prognosis or treatment.

The PGI (Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research) is frequently in the news, usually for the wrong reasons. Inter and intra-departmental rivalries and a very strong union, facilitate leaks to the press. These unfortunately make news — eulogies from patient to doctor or innovative stem-cell treatments and pioneering surgeries don’t. But to see a first-rate physician, who is lauded internationally, laptop perched on a broken table, multi-tasking as he examines scores of OPD patients per day, or a surgeon operating, undaunted by a wasp sting, delivered straight in his eye in the Operation Theatre, is to see the Hippocratic oath being lived.

There probably are doctors, nurses and staff who err, but their individual errors cannot undermine the institute’s accomplishments in nurturing the legions to good health.

Team working is manifest in every aspect of the working of this humungous institute: a mini city within a city. Patients in their hundreds descend in the early morning to the new OPD to get their tests done. Doctors collect samples with assembly line precision and hand it over to the pathology department who have the reports ready by the evening. The logistics are scary, but the systems work, and the PGI laboratories deliver the most accurate results in the city.

However, what truly personifies team working is the conduct of surgeries in the ailing operation theatres. Different departments interact seamlessly on the basis of archaic, hand written notes on ubiquitous plain vanilla PGI cards and files.

It also helps that the hospital provides victuals at a nominal price to facilitate and fuel patients and attendants alike on their travails on its sprawling green campus: the best elaichi teas and coffees are available in the new OPD, bread pakoras in the advanced eye-care and pediatric centre buildings, cream biscuits, and muffins outside the Nehru block to be washed down with pista milk, custom-bottled for PGI .

What also raises the bar in this institute are the good Samaritans: the security man who helps the tottering senior citizen, the staff cutting short their lunch to assist an illiterate patient fill out a form.

It’s a place where the energy is positive, medicine is still a vocation and the human spirit triumphs over limitations in infrastructure. Is it any wonder then that one wants to sing hosannas to the PGI and its team. Partap Singh Kairon must surely be happy.