Do Patients-Work-for-Doctors in Today’s Healthcare Services of Bangladesh?

In today’s healthcare services particularly medical-care market has been blamed to be polluted in economy country-wise such as Bangladesh. Doctors here are blamed for requiring patients’ unnecessary tests for doctor’s own monetary gains. These are no different in case of universal healthcare system country-wise. Also, doctors’ roles in writing prescriptions for patients are blamed to be related to pharmaceutical products’ promotions. This situation in medical-care services country-wise such as Bangladesh has motivated conducting this survey-data study where primary data were collected from three groups - patients, patient-attendants, and doctors. The Questionnaire Forms were distributed and interviewed randomly chosen 100 exist patients along with100 attendants of patients of three public, two private and one not-for-profit hospitals located in Dhaka City. On doctors’ opinions, data were collected from randomly chosen 30 doctors of three public (15), two private (10) and one non-profit private (5) hospitals located in Dhaka City. Results of data analysis clearly shows that nearly 79% attendants of patients showed negative perceptions on doctor’s cordiality towards patients and 78% showed negative perceptions on trusting doctors.The estimated overall weighted mean was 2 (two), which confirmed the current doctor-patient relationship to be poor. On patients’ opinions, 52% patients showed negative on doctors’ cordiality issue and 69% patients showed negative on trusting doctors in Bangladesh. Here estimated overall mean was 2.9, which confirms a poor doctor-patient relationship. On overall perception - Felt like “doctors-work-for-patients” in healthcare market, 65% patients expressed negative perceptions. In other words, nearly 65% patients believe that “patients-work-for-doctors” in today’s medical care market in Bangladesh. In contrast, over 90% doctors were positive towards doctor’s freedom of choosing treatment-protocol. Over 72% doctors acknowledged about their 2nd job. The findings of this study clearly shows that the doctor-patient relationship is poor in patients and patient-attendants’ opinions, however, they are different in doctors’ viewpoints. So, answer to the question posed depends on who are asked. But the reflections of today’s medical-care markets scenarios in economy of Bangladesh are no deniable, which deserves to be studied further