‘Fortis management raised a voice of protest, but they were overruled’

NEWDELHI: Fortis Healthcare Ltd has been in news for wrong reasons of late, including investigations related to advances made to companies linked to its erstwhile promoters, a financial crunch and allegedly charging exorbitant fees for treating a child. In an interview, chief executive Bhavdeep Singh offers some explanations and defends some of the company’s actions. Edited excerpts: The catalyst for this obviously was group and promoter issues. Whatever issues we are dealing with are all linked to that. We have made a very clean break with the promoters in every way, shape and form. It’s unfortunate, Shivinder built this company but the reality is that was yesterday. There is no connect, there can’t be. This is a different company today, it has to be a different company. We need to move forward. This is no longer that Fortis. It has to be different we have made a clean break we have made an absolute break. We need to move forward. We did a detailed clinical investigation with respect to what happened in the case. Even the government of Haryana in their report clearly said that there was no evidence of medical negligence here and there wasn’t. After the story broke, there was a lot of noise about the number of gloves and syringes that were used. There was something like 700 gloves used, the reality is the gloves that we used were exactly right. If we hadn’t used them, the headline would have been Fortis practises poor infection control practices. The number of syringes used were exactly right. That’s what should have been done.