The licence that was cancelled belonged to Ad-Din Hospital’s pathology centre, not the hospital itself, lawyer Shishir Monir has claimed.
He made the claim in a Facebook post on Friday morning, attaching a copy of the licence cancellation order.
He said that on June 4, the hospital was issued a show-cause notice under the Medical Practice and Private Clinics and Laboratories (Regulation) Ordinance, 1982. The notice cited the hospital’s licence number as HSM 4310059 and asked for a reply within 72 hours.
Shishir Monir claimed that the licence number in question is not the hospital’s but the pathology centre’s. The hospital’s licence number is HSM 4310058, he said. The government has issued two licences for running the facility, one for the hospital and the other for the pathology laboratory.
Attaching the licences of both the hospital and the pathology centre in the Facebook post, he said: “The authorities (the government) cancelled the licence of one of them. They alone can say which. Was this their negligence or deliberate? If it was negligence, what kind of negligence? The burden of judgment rests with you.”
On this matter, Dr. Abu Hossain Mohammad Moinul Ahsan, director of the hospitals and clinics branch (hospitals and clinics) of the Directorate General of Health Services, said: “We have clearly stated in the order that the hospital’s licence has been cancelled. Doing these things will be of no use. We will go and check tomorrow. And if the order needs to be amended, that too will be done later.”
Earlier, on the previous day, the Director General of the Directorate General of Health Services, Professor Dr. Prabhat Chandra Biswas, said the hospital’s reply to the show-cause notice was not satisfactory, so the hospital’s licence had been cancelled under Section 11(2)(b) of the Medical Practice and Private Clinics and Laboratories (Regulation) Ordinance, 1982. The hospital is now without a licence, he said, and no patient should seek treatment at a hospital that has no licence.
The Directorate General of Health Services’ licence cancellation order states that an inquiry committee formed by the ministry over the deaths of six newborns in a ward of the hospital on May 27 identified an oxygen shortage in the ward and negligence by the hospital authorities as the cause of the deaths. In that context, the Directorate General of Health Services issued a show-cause notice asking why the hospital’s licence should not be cancelled. Although the hospital authorities were given 72 hours to reply to the notice, they applied for a further 48 hours. The hospital authorities later submitted a written reply to the show-cause notice on June 9. As the reply and explanation given were not satisfactory to the authorities, the hospital’s licence was cancelled under Section 11(2)(b) of the Medical Practice and Private Clinics and Laboratories (Regulation) Ordinance, 1982.
Under Section 12 of the ordinance, there is a legal provision to appeal to the government against a cancellation order within 30 days of the licence being cancelled.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report