'Bangladeshi hospitals are not gender friendly'

From waiting rooms and to the emergency wards, the privacy of both the male and female patients are violated in the hospitals of the country.

The doctors are also the victim. There is no separate arrangement for the transgenders, too.  

Organisers asserted so in the programme "Gender Friendly Environment in Health Facilities", held at Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU) on Saturday afternoon. 

The BSMMU and International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) organised the programme jointly. Doctors, nurses, the icddr,b researchers, teachers and students of the University of Dhaka's gender studies department partook in the discussion. 

Speakers of the event stated that most of the hospitals in the country have no separate toilet for males and females; even there is no separate toilet for the female and male doctors. 

There is no privacy in the doctors' chamber and the attendants of the patients also do not behave in a gender friendly way.

Professor Layla Anjuman Banu of the BSMMU asserted that there should be gender friendly policy in medical facilitation centres. , A hospital, during its recruitment, has to verify that its would-be officers and employees are aware of gender friendly policies.

"It cannot be taken for granted that a good student is a good human being. A woman has to be treated as a human rather a 'woman', and it should be the norm in the hospitals," Assistant Professor of the BSMMU's Department of Public Health Khalequzzaman said.

There have to be sexual harassment prevention cells in the hospitals, and they have to be monitored, said the icddr,b's scientist ATM Iqbal Anwar, adding that gender friendly infrastructures have to be developed in the hospitals.