Delhi High Court: In a writ petition filed before the Court for upgradation of infrastructure of government hospitals, the Division Bench of Manmohan, ACJ.*, and Mini Pushkarna, J., directed Union of India to improve infrastructure in its own hospitals putting emphasis on the emergency wards and directed the Government of Delhi to improve medical facilities in its own hospital putting emphasis on the emergency wards.
The Court took note of the report dated 29-05-2019 of the Expert Committee, which was prepared qua the hospitals administered by the Government of Delhi. The Court opined that critical patients were brought to the hospitals, the first few hours were considered as “golden hour” which could make the crucial difference between life and death. Over-crowding of emergency wards should be circumvented to make the best medical assistance available to critical patients who need urgent medical care. The Court thus observed that there was a need to improve the space and the medical facilities available in the emergency wards, including the number of doctors and medical equipments. The Court opined that the emergency care system required strengthening and enhancement to provide quality healthcare to the needy in emergencies.
Thus, the Court directed the Union of India to undertake an exercise of improvement of the infrastructure in its own hospitals, particularly to upgrade emergency wards. Further, the Court directed the Government of Delhi to take steps for improvement of medical facilities in its hospital and particularly to upgrade emergency wards and to file an Action Taken Report specifying if the recommendations of Expert Committee were practical and if they had been implemented.
[Court on its own Motion v. Union of India, 2023 SCC OnLine Del 7695, Order dated 21-11-2023]
Advocates who appeared in this case :
For the Petitioners: Siddharth Aggarwal, Senior Advocate; Vishwajeet Singh, Rudrali Patil, Shashank Deo Sudhi, Bipendra P.K., Nancy Shah, Khushboo Tomar, Diwakar Chirania, Advocates
For the Respondents: Chetan Sharma, ASG; Ajay Digpaul, Anil Soni, Apoor Kurup, CGSC; Santosh Kr. Tripathi, Ajjay Arora, Kapil Dutta, Standing Counsel; Amit Gupta, Saurabh Tripathi, Devrath Yadav, Ishita Pathak, Kamal R. Digpaul, Vikramaditya Singh, Avishkar Singhvi, Naved Ahmed and Vivek Kr. Singh, Sagar Saxena, Parmeet Singh, Sarthak Pandey, Mukesh Kumar Mishra, Kaushal Gautam, Snehpreet Kaur, Arun Panwar, Pradyumn Rao, Utkarsh Singh, Kartik Sharma, Prashansa Sharma, Rishabh Srivastava, Akhil Hasija, Advocates
