Continuing the fight against medical negligence, 40 people from various professional backgrounds such as medico-legal experts along with patients and advocates are going to form a forum to provide a platform for patients to raise their voice against medical negligence.
On Monday, these professionals, along with Abhijeet More, the co-ordinator of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, a Pune based NGO that organised the public hearing of National Human Rights Commission at Tiss earlier this month, held a meeting in a Mulund school where they came up with the plan.
“This is for the first time that due to patients’ initiative such a forum is being formed,” said Mr More.
The forum will have two cells, legal advisers and medical experts, to provide opinions in the medical negligence cases. Shreya Nimonkar, one of the main coordinators who are behind the idea of formation of the forum said, “People who have complaints of medical negligence can approach us. Firstly, medico-legal experts would go through the papers to know if the case is genuinely a medical negligence case or not. Second, if it is assessed as negligence case, it will be forwarded to legal advice to analyse the legal aspects of it followed by medical experts to check all aspects of the case.”
These experts would help in filing cases with the Medical Council of India, Consumer Court and Human Rights Commission to fight for their right of health.
“Many times, genuine cases also fail to receive justice due to proper guidance. So, through this forum, we are trying to help those patients,” said Ms Nimonkar.
Most of the patients who are involved in forming the forum have medical negligence cases against private hospitals. “There is no proper platform or grievance redressal forum for patients with medical negligence cases. All the government bodies just sit with our files while they gather dust. So, we are forming this forum to help people,” said Chandrakant Kulkarni, another patient who is one of the forming members of the forum.
