Docs in the dock

While the police work on establishing Apollo Hospital's precise role in the Rahul Mahajan case, and whether there was indeed an attempt to cover any tracks, the hospital authorities are not improving their reputation by their handling of the issue, and by what appears to be an attempt to brazen it out. For instance, there is the internal e-mail from Apollo Chairman Prathap C Reddy to doctors in the hospital, saying the team treating Mr Mahajan had gone by the book; he even congratulated the team on "saving Rahul's life". This is odd, when the police are investigating whether the hospital declared Mr Mahajan to be more ill than he already was, to prevent the police from interrogating him for a good 80 hours after he was first brought in""enough time, if anyone were so inclined, to coach Mr Mahajan on what he should or should not say. The hospital's medico-legal report, critical in all such cases of suspected poisoning, reported that Mr Mahajan was stable and conscious when he was brought in, and his pulse rate and blood pressure were within the acceptable range (the pulse was 85 and blood pressure 100/60)""yet, the hospital reported that Mr Mahajan was extremely critical and on a ventilator.

Earlier, the hospital was caught on the wrong foot when it reported that Mr Mahajan had tested negative for 14 separate drugs, including cocaine and heroin. After the Dr Lal Path Lab reported that the heroin dosage in his blood was over 30 times the permissible level, the hospital got into semantics, and then insisted that it had never given a clean chit to Mr Mahajan. On top of this, there are other questions about the timings in the hospital's register being fudged""while the chronological entries in the hospital's log books show that Bibek Maitra (the late Pramod Mahajan's secretary) was brought in before Mr Mahajan, the time of entry for both has been overwritten and indicates that Mr Mahajan was brought in first. The significance of this change in timing is unclear, but the over-writing points to some motive that will become clear over time.

Then, there is the matter of the violation of privacy. By declaring that it had got the family's permission, Apollo may have addressed the ethics of holding a press conference to make public the results of Mr Mahajan's tests. But the hospital's handling of the entire matter, raising suspicions of an attempt to cover up wrongdoing, does raise questions about the professional and ethical standards of even leading private, corporate hospitals. Perhaps it is time for the Medical Council of India to get more active in its task of regulating medical conduct.

There are non-medical issues too. The late Pramod Mahajan's other secretary has been arrested for trying to destroy evidence by asking the servants to clean up once Mr Mahajan and Maitra were taken to the hospital. The servants had been asked to take the duo to Apollo instead of the much nearer All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (which is government-run), and it is plausible that the time saved might have saved Bibek Maitra's life. Finally, there is the case of Pramod Mahajan's brother-in-law, a former home minister of Maharashtra, asserting that it was a case of poisoning. None of it makes for a pretty picture.