Mushroom-growing Illegal healthcare facilities, such as clinics, hospitals, and diagnostic centres, have emerged as a major threat to public health with their poor quality of services.
Amid a lack of monitoring and accountability, they often endanger people’s lives, inflate medical expenses, and erode public trust in the health sector, health rights activists and medical practitioners.
The illegal business continued just to make a profit from the lifesaving healthcare sector beyond the ethics of medical practice, taking advantage of lax monitoring.
Illegal healthcare is also seriously affecting doctors’ reputations by producing flawed diagnoses that often lead to the wrong treatment.
Experts believe that many hospitals with licences also indulge in such practices, though they have some accountability.
As the illegal hospitals are not registered, agencies often cannot take action against them until they get exposed through some incidents.
The private sector meets the 60 per cent healthcare service demand of the country with over 100,000-bed facilities. DGHS said it had authorised 15,233 healthcare facilities across the country.
On February 11, the DGHS submitted a list of licensed healthcare providers to the High Court, complying with its directive issued on January 15, responding to a hearing of a writ petition filed over the death of five-year-old Ayaan Ahmed.
The number of incidences of wrong treatments is horrifically increasing. The government has no control over the hospitals and support system to plug in the system loopholes.
Our journey for smart Bangladesh is meaningless without fixing healthcare problems.