Corporate Cocktail

If you had stepped out of India some 10 yrs back and haven't been there for past 4 yrs or so... We welcome you to the new CORPORATE Chennai!

Corporates are every where and in every business. They ventured in to IT, Chennai saw a change in lifestyle. People started making more money and now it has managed to create a rift between the IT people and non-IT people with the latter blaming almost everything, even if their dog falls ill, on the former. Increasingly, these days, tamil movies have taken a dig at people working in IT industry. They portray people as being paid big money for doing nothing. I might have to get in to "Mudhalvan" (tamil movie) style of challenging them to be working on a tight-deadline-die-and-finish-it project at least for one project.

The corporates then moved to Shopping malls, we saw big malls coming up in Chennai. These were fun! Time pass... time pass and then there were some serious buyers as well. To add to it they then stepped up to the cinema halls. Come "Multiplexes", which Cheran in his last movie says is only for the well-to-do people. With multiplexes and malls and big, classy and well done offices, the outlook of Chennai started changing drastically. Then in to retails... Reliance has taken over the retail world.

But then they moved in to an important area.... HEALTH CARE. Yup the hospitals. Good is that we have got brilliant hospitals with all international facilities. You can get any thing done with out even thinking about going abroad to get it cured.

But its more painful to see these hospitals with state-of-art facilities operating on a Eureka forbes style "fix-the-target-and-do whatever-it takes-to-achieve-it". Personally, I have gone through the experience.

Please do not get me wrong. I am not here saying that doctors shouldn't be making money. I am not a dumber! But when corporates enter a field, the focus is on making money. The profit margins turn in to a bigger balloon and I am sure that doctors out there would also agree when I say this.

One big chain of hospitals on old-mahabalipuram-road in chennai has only one way of treating the customers (yeah the patients)

1. Take ECG
2. Take X-Ray
3. Scan
4. Blood test
5. Urine test

With all this, let me find out why you have a high fever. One of my close doctor friend agrees that they are compelled to do what they are doing. These hospitals are fixing targets for each of the in-house doctors and their renumeration is tied to the target.

Now you might want to consider doing a "MBA" after your Masters in the medicine field. With corporate hospitals doing this to the health care, people are slowly moving away from these hospitals.... Once I was rushing this employee of a small mechanical lathe shop to a hospital. He was bleeding badly as he had his hand crushed in the machine. The only thing he said in the state of pain is "Please do not take me to that premium private hospital. Take me to 24-hrs hospital (govt run)"

Can doctors out there do something abt this?