Something really sinister is going on with hospital beds in kolkata. We discharged 4 patients very early this morning, and all the 4 beds were empty from 9:30 am.
I was anticipating 4 patients within next 30 minutes, but nobody came!!
There's a website which works in real-time to show availability of beds, after 12 I checked the website and it showed 0 vacancy in this makeshift hospital.
Thought it was some technical glitch, instead of calling up the non medical guys who deal with admission/ discharge etc. I called up Sasthya Bhawan directly and explained the situation.
After some call transfers from one guy to another someone called Srijan checked the system and told me " na sir ekhane to shob bhorti dekhachhe" meaning, no sir, system is showing all beds are occupied.
Then I specifically gave him the bed numbers of discharged patients, still thinking it's some technical issue.
Srijan then told me the names of the patients occupying those 4 empty beds and they were not the discharged patients!! ( Since it's a covid only hospital, we send list of patients names and adresses to swasthya bhawan for record keeping and follow up as there's no medical records department)
I didn't understand anything and told him these patients don't exist and clear up the beds in system.
After this lengthy phone call I got busy and didn't check the website again.
Now around 16:00 Hrs, a volunteer (some local guys basically hang around here and I don't exactly know what they do) came up with a list of 4 names ( I was sitting @ reception, grabbing a quick lunch, the girl at the reception was not around) and told me these people are coming for admission. These are those non existing patients. And exactly 4 of them.
Normally any person can come and get himself/ herself admitted here, however till yesterday we couldn't admit anyone due to non availability of beds and returned a lot of people. Today not a single patient turned up since morning despite having 4 vacant beds.
Now all the 4 patients have come ( none lives nearby) and had to admit them as they are genuinely sick, but I still don't know what exactly is going on.
