The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
providing in-service refresher training for all categories of health personnel
(Osman, 2004).
iv. Weak Management and Coordination Network: The management of the
tertiary health care centers, i.e. district hospitals, medical college hospitals
and referral hospitals is a major issue in public health governance. Abuse
of trade unionism by the lower level employees makes the situation
worst. Maltreatment of poor outdoor patients by the medical staff is very
common. The class III and IV employees in every district level and medical
college hospital are so strongly organized that doctors and hospital
administration appear helpless to control them.
They build homesteads in the open spaces within the hospital campus
and also rent space to outsiders. Thus the whole environment of the
hospitals has become unhygienic both physically and socially. These
protected slum-like enclaves are safe havens for criminals in most of the
medical colleges and district hospitals. Taking appropriate action against
these unauthorized occupants was never taken seriously, and if, as seldom
happened, plans were made to remove them, these failed due to lack
of coordination between different executive bodies of the government
(Sobhan, 1998).
Payment of unofficial fees in these hospitals is very common. While official
fees are minimal, patients are paying out substantial sums as unofficial
fees, in the form of bribes and payments to staff to ensure that they receive
the services they are technically eligible to receive free of cost (ibid).
Sanitation facilities in the public hospitals are very poor. Food supply to
the patients is another area of mismanagement and misuse of resources.
Both the quality and quantity of food are inadequate to the needs of the
sick.
Lack of coordination among different levels of service creates duplication
and dichotomy. Insufficient coordination between the Ministry and
the Health Directorate has often created bottlenecks and unnecessary
constraints and duplication of work. The Director General of Health Services
and Health Ministry both oversee personnel matters including posting
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and transfer of all class 1 Officers, resulting in dichotomy, duplication and
delay in decision making (Hye, 1985 cited in Osman, 2004).
Unfortunately, there is no well defined role for the MOHFW to intervene
in important health related issues in the sectors controlled by other
ministries. Nor is there any meaningful co-ordination among the executive
bodies, particularly ministries, to monitor public health.
People suffer from lack of health services information. A well co-ordinated
public health system is not available to the public (Sobhan, 1998).
Moreover, the institutional arrangement for implementing health
programmes in Bangladesh seriously suffers from the absence of an
effective information flow. The entire administration is still mostly
paper based. Shortage of data means that evaluating the programs and
correcting actions is difficult. Lack of coordination within units of the
Ministry of Health, lack of co-ordination between different ministries, lack
of sufficient ICT facilities in all levels, inadequacy of trained manpower
including inappropriate placement, inadequacy of up to date data and
often unreliable data, inadequate use of health information at policy level,
are acting as impediments to good governance.
3.4 Right to Work:
The Bangladesh Constitution, in Article 20, acknowledges ‘work as a right’
but does not guarantee to ensure this right. It has developed a number
of policies including the National Labor Policy, the Domestic Worker
conduct and Welfare Policy, the Occupational Safety and Health Policy,
but all these policies are in draft form. Since the policies are drafted in the
lens of the normative framework of the ICESCR and the General Comment
no. 18 and 14, this study emphasizes the finalization of the policies and
their implementation rather than researching the gaps which are not
remarkable. However, in absence of the approved policies, the present
scenario of ‘right to work’ in Bangladesh is discussed below.
The generic state obligation under the right to work policy includes the
state’s obligation to respect, protect and fulfill each person’s access to
work to earn one’s living and the obligation to guarantee that this work
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