Nagpur: Wockhardt Heart hospital in Nagpur is one of the seven hospitals that has been found by the FDA to be indulging in unethical and dangerous ( for the patient) practise of reusing equipment like catheters which are supposed to be destroyed after one time use.
FDA found that each catheter was used twice at least after being sterilized after first use. This is going against the strict instruction mentioned on the equipment itself that it MUST be destroyed after one use.
What is more, not just the first, but even the second patient, was charged the full ‘price’ for a new catheter. And while a catheter can be purchased betwee Rs. 6000 to Rs. 9000, the hospital was charging Rs. 22,000/ for it from each patient!
What is a Catheter?
Medical catheters are tubes that can be inserted into a body cavity, vessel or duct, usually to allow for the administration of fluids, medications or gases or to drain fluids or urine from the body. Examples of some types of catheter include intravenous catheters, urinary catheters and chest drainage tubes.
There are also Balloon catheters and guiding catheters that are used in treating cardiac patients while conducting angiography and angioplasty.
It apparently seems that these very catheters used in cardiology were also re used by Wockhardt since the Heart hospital in Shankar Nagar has been named by the FDA in its charge sheet.
The FDA Minister of Maharashtra, Madan Yerawar, gave this information to the House in a statement.
He informed the honourable members of the house that FDA made this discovery of malpractice by the hospital in inspections it had carried out last year.
The hospital has been charged under Section 18 C.
When a Nagpur Today correspondent messaged Wockhardt representative the video clipping of the Minister’s statement and their own version of it, he got the reply
“News is not fake but the way they have presented is absolutely fake…”
So the news is definitely not fake, which means they have been charged; so the accusation of reusing ‘one time only’ equipment is apparently true.
When the undersigned called up the Doctor in charge there was no response.
Later an Official version was sent by the Hospital which says:
We have certain points –
1.we do reuse catheters . However we do not charge patients as stated in news.
2. We use proper sterilisation process (best in Nagpur) before reusing catheter. Sterilisation process is not just as per NABH protocol but also as per international standards.
3. Lastly all heart hospitals reuse catheter….if we don’t reuse, patient cost will go up.
—Sunita Mudaliar (Exicutive Editor) & Rajeev Kushwaha
