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Category: Case Studies
October 01, 2009
When a pregnant woman, Vaishali (not her real name), died in a village in Gujarat, we decided to examine the circumstances that led to her death. We asked healthcare professionals and the sarpanch in the village if they could identify the events that caused her death. Not only were they clueless ...
October 01, 2009
It happened during my obstetrics-gynaecology rotation at a municipal hospital in Mumbai. I was the on-call intern. By definition, an intern is a fresh medical graduate who has to spend a year in different departments of the hospital before he gets his degree. During this time he is supposed to le...
October 01, 2009
The story of the young woman in rural Gujarat and of the woman from a slum in Mumbai , reveal the faces hidden behind the statistics, and the problem of the high maternal mortality rate in India . The reported maternal mortality ratio (MMR) in India was 301 per 100,000 live births in 2001-03 . H...
October 01, 2009
The two accounts of maternal deaths narrated here reveal several systemic issues that contribute to the huge problem of maternal mortality in developing countries. While the two incidents happened in different settings, they have several common themes.
October 01, 2007
As a college student, I would spend 10 to 15 hours a week in public hospitals, escorting patients and working on social service projects with medical students, interns and residents.
October 01, 2007
As a former MD resident in a teaching hospital in the late 1990s I have witnessed situations similar to the one described in this account. The responses of resident doctors today are clearly not too different from what ours were; they probably face the same pressures that we did, a decade ago.
July 01, 2007
When I refused to give a false certificate to a 15-year-old girl which stated that she was sick and therefore could not attend school for 15 days, little did I know that I was signing the death warrant of a man I had never seen in my life. Manjula, the girl, pleaded with me, saying that her teach...
July 01, 2007
In a super specialty government medical centre, antiretroviral treatment (ART) is provided to People Living with HIV and AIDS (PLHAs). Each month, on an average, 100 PLHAs come to the centre for ART. A clinician heads this ART centre in a medical college.
July 01, 2007
While assessing the questions brought up by the case, I will use the moral principles theory and its adaptation by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for its ethical guidelines. I will briefly refer to the principles of informed consent and voluntary action, professional competence, ri...
April 01, 2007
Common infections precipitate malnutrition, which may in turn reduce resistance to other infections. The 1960s was a period of growing awareness of the interaction between infections and malnutrition. Up to then the research on and organisation of programmes for these two issues were separate ent...