Mumbai: Instead of tending to patients, nurses perform at annual event

Screengrab from a video that shows nurses, who were allegedly on duty dancing to Bollywood songs at the annual program

On Tuesday night, leaving their patients to the care of a handful of doctors, nurses working for the Bhagwati Hospital in Borivli instead, allegedly, decided to shake a leg at an annual get-together that honours their contribution to health services. Several on-duty nurses danced at the Prabodhankar Thackeray mini theatre in Borivli West during the function organised by the hospital's school of nursing, leaving doctors in the emergency ward handling everything by themselves.

The videos of their dance performances, accessed by mid-day, show the on-duty nurses performing bollywood numbers on stage in front of Dr Pradeep Jadhav, chief medical superintendent of peripheral hospitals, who was the guest of honour. This comes at a time when the hospital is short on manpower. mid-day on December 28 had revealed in the report ‘After R28.8 cr revamp, BMC hospital treats just 5 patients a day' how the hospital is suffering from staff shortage and treats only 4-5 patients every day.

Dancing for hours
"We are functioning on a skeleton structure with a 60 per cent shortage of employees. For emergency, we hardly have two-three nurses working where the need is double. In this time, if on-duty nurses are allowed to go to dance on stage in the presence of seniors, then where will patients go?" asked a senior doctor working at the hospital on Tuesday.

"Because of their unprofessional and unethical behaviour, we doctors had to suffer so much. Can you image a hospital without nurses for hours? We doctors can't do everything single-handedly on such a shortage of staff," he added.

Guest of honour says
As alleged by doctors from the hospital, the programme was for the nursing students, not for on-duty nurses, who had no role to play in it. However, Dr Jadhav refuted the allegations and said that it was the annual function and part of the curriculum of the nursing college. "Around 80 students participated in the function organized by the nursing college. This is arranged every year where the nurses participate in a cultural function followed by a get together. All the nurses who participated were students of the college. Why would on-duty nurses dance in the programme? These are complete allegations," said Dr Jadhav.

When mid-day spoke to Dr K Pimple, the hospital's medical superintendent who also attended the function, he did not accept if the nurses were on duty, but confirmed that two senior medical officers from the hospital were asked to handle the management of the function. "There was sufficient staff, as we had asked two senior doctors to chip in as there was a function. They looked after the emergency and surgery patients," said Dr Pimple.