GETTING APPROVAL FOR SURGERY TOUGH, SAYS LUDHIANA WOMAN

LUDHIANA : Nirmal Kaur, 42, a resident of Machhian Kalan in Ludhiana has been suffering from uterine fibroids. She has been advised surgery for five tumours in the uterus.

“Last year, my family was enrolled under the health insurance scheme so I decided to avail of it. However, applying for surgery is cumbersome. For the past week, my husband Amrik Singh and I have been running from one department to another for approval of the surgery,” she says.

Nirmal’s husband works in a factory and admits he has not been able to go for duty. “First, we applied at the civil hospital counter for insurance and were told to visit doctors concerned at the ESI Hospital.

From there, we were referred to the mother and child unit in the civil hospital, where my wife was asked to undergo a fresh ultrasound. As the list of people seeking an ultrasound was long, we were told to return later. Since then it’s been a week of shuttling for approvals. Now we’ve been told that the surgery will be done only at a government hospital but we don’t know where and when,” says Amrik Singh.

Nirmal says, “We have been told that a government circular on July 30 says health insurance beneficiaries should be treated in government hospitals. But due to Covid-19 no elective surgeries are taking place.”