Madurai: 'Private hospitals do not create awareness about health insurance scheme’

MADURAI: Public aren’t informed properly about chief minister’s Comprehensive Health Insurance Scheme (CMCHS) at some private hospitals in Madurai when they go for treatment, claimed healthcare professionals in the city on Saturday. The experts also said that communication gap between the doctors/ healthcare professionals and patients was still an issue and it was the main reason for some medico-legal issues.

The healthcare professionals were speaking about this during the sidelines of a national colloquium 'Yuva '19' on 'innovations in hospital administration' organised by ANT Educational Medical and Social Welfare Trust and Madurai Kamaraj University.

The guest speakers of the event predominantly focussed on two aspects – the clarity about health insurance among the public and about how good communication between a patient and a doctor could be improved for effective treatment – claiming that these were the two areas that needed to be bettered.

Chairman of ANT Educational Medical and Social Welfare Trust T Jayarajsekar claimed that in some occasions, CMCHS scheme didn’t reach the beneficiaries properly because certain hospitals in the city didn’t explain about the same to the patients. "CMCHS is a very good initiative, but some hospitals don’t tell patients about the scheme. We’ve witnessed incidents, where the patients have had to pay for some amount for surgery despite the insurance scheme covering the expenses, was a possibility," he told TOI.

Meanwhile, Krishna Kumar, a chief operating officer (COO) of a private hospital said that healthcare professionals and doctors should be trained in such a way that they were all in the same page when it comes to communicating with patients. "All the staff of a hospital - including doctors - must get training properly so that a patient while getting treatment has clarity on his/ her particular condition and the treatment procedure. Gaps in communication now and again lead to medicolegal issues," he said.