She had a normal delivery at a government hospital in Kakinada on 26 September. Afterwards she started bleeding, and when massage and uterotonics were not enough the team packed the uterine cavity with a tube and cotton to press on the bleeding surface from inside. It worked. A pack like that is meant to come out within about twenty-four hours, under antibiotic cover. On 30 September she went home, and the ward register said both had been taken out. The postgraduate on duty had written the entry. Two consultants read it and signed the discharge.

The pain started at home, lower abdomen, severe. About ten days later she went to a private hospital, and the doctors there found the tube and the cotton still sitting in her uterus. She came back to the government hospital on the Saturday and was treated on the Sunday. Her family complained, the district collector ordered a probe, and two assistant professors from the obstetrics and gynaecology unit have been suspended. The principal said action would follow against the postgraduate who wrote that line.

A public notice signed by the NMC Secretary on 8 October forwards a health ministry letter from May that puts an estimated 52 lakh injuries a year, roughly 14,000 a day, down to medical errors, medication errors and hospital-acquired infections included. The letter gives no source for the figure, so read it as the ministry's working number. What reaches your department is a formal order constituting a Patient Safety Cell, plus a sheet of eleven rows, one safety domain each, wanting a faculty name, designation, mobile number and email against every one. Orthopaedics is named against a single domain. The 2024 version of this letter gave colleges fifteen days. This one sets no date at all, which is usually how a sheet lands on a Friday for Monday.

Read →

Patients at her government psychiatry OPD are told to come before 9 AM. He came at 11:30 with his child, for an evaluation. By noon he was making a scene outside her door. At 12:15 he pushed into the room while she was examining someone else, whose privacy she had been trying to protect. Bohot dekhe hai tere jaise students, janti nai mai kaun hu.

Outside, people who had arrived at eight on empty stomachs were still waiting, some of them having given up a day's dehadi to be there. She asked her faculty to hand the child to another resident, because the rapport had gone and she was frightened. In psychiatry the conversation is the examination, so a frightened examiner cannot conduct it. Her faculty agreed. The man who wanted to be seen sooner sat in that hospital until five.

Most of it is quieter than this, and it travels by phone. Every resident knows the sentence: upar se phone aaya hai.

Read →

Three years of MCC Round 1 allotments, 3,206 MS Orthopaedics seats, arranged around the one question that matters before choice filling: what your rank and your category actually got. Sixty of every hundred seats open to an unreserved candidate in 2025 were paid. Half the free open seats were gone by rank 5,600. At rank 1,000 an open candidate could still have got into 141 colleges; at rank 10,000, twenty-four. Between 12,430 and 25,000 there was not one free All India Quota seat, and 380 open DNB ones.

Read →

Know a colleague who should be reading this? Forward this email to them.

Forwarded this issue? Subscribe free →