Death-birth entries recorded casually; people suffering

Death-Birth entries recorded casually; people suffering

Yash Khajuria
JAMMU, Oct 25: Call it a height of illiteracy or negligence at galore that entries of death and birth are being recorded wrongly in many government health institutions as the job is being performed by by the under-trained and sub-qualified staff.

The system is in vogue in almost all health institutions where such mistakes are  being committed on registration of names of the parents as well as those of the new born siblings which later have to undergo the tedious and cumbersome process at Municipal and allied institutions to get these rectified.

The dilemma goes unabated as incorrect records of patients in their record books are entered by these staff attendants who do not even care to lend proper audience to the spellings of the names uttered by the attendants thus leaving them into a lurch.

Common public hence faces a number of hardships in making their further documents ranging from birth certificate to death certificate.
To add a convenience to public, National Informatics Centre (NIC) started the online death and birth certificate service but the incorrect records sent by the health institution to the JMC has made this service useless as most of the records on searching by the public in the JMC sites responds as “Record not found” after which they have to undertake traumatic journey of various JMC departments.

It is pertinent to mention here that there are number of big and small health institution in the province which are owned by the state government, prominent among which include Government Medical College (GMC) Jammu, Shri Maharaja Gulab Singh Hospital (SMGS), Government Hospital Gandhi Nagar, SDH R.S. Pura, SDH Bishnah which as per the government tall claims have well qualified trained staff for the treatment and entry of the patients record but despite of this, large number of records are entered wrongly by them due to unknown reasons.

This problem is mainly encountered in the delivery cases where authorities mostly enter incorrect records i.e incorrect mother or father’s name and many times address too.

The staff deployed even doesn’t know how to spell a simple name and just finish off by scribbling the letters heard. Due to this casual and irresponsible attitude of the hospital authorities’ large number of people face problem after the death of their kin or the birth of a new one as when they reach Jammu Municipal Corporation (JMC) office the certificates they find bear incorrect names and address written on them.

Not only the names, many times the address written by the authorities are found incorrect due to which they face number of hardships to make them correct for which they have to spend money and time due to the lengthy official formalities for correction.

Gopal Krishan, a resident of R.S. Pura said that his wife Sangeeta gave birth to baby boy at Government Hospital Gandhi Nagar but the hospital authorities entered her name as Sangita instead of Sangeeta while his husband’s name was entered as Krishan Kumar instead of Gopal krishan due to which the couple is facing a number of hardships in making the birth certificate of their child.

He said due to this mistake of hospital authorities his money and time is getting wasted as when he contacted the hospital authorities for the mistake get rectified the officials have directed him to bring affidavits and other documents. Even after providing all the documents for correction when he approached the hospital authorities, they annoyingly misbehaved and asked him to contact JMC.

When contacted Director Health Services Jammu Dr. Madhu Khullar, said that she is aware of this but this is not a fault of the concerned health officials. She informed that this was mainly due to the wrong information/ record provided to the health officials by the attendants of patients who themselves don’t know the accurate information of the patient brought by them. She refuted the allegation that mistakes were going on at a mass scale but said she will direct all the concerned superintendents to check this.

Though,  she gave a simple reason of avoidance and negligence the irking part remains as to how it is possible that a husband does not know his spouse’s and his own name correctly or a family does not know the name of their relatives.