An appellate body hearing the Max hospital twin baby death case today extended by a month the stay on a Delhi government order cancelling its licence in December, authorities said.
 

The stay will be in effect till May 17, the next date of hearing, they said. The April 12 hearing was the third in the case by the Financial Commissioner's court, Delhi. The licence cancellation case pertains to the birth of premature twins at the hospital in Shalimar Bagh on November 30 last year. Both the babies were declared stillborn by the hospital, one of them wrongly, and handed over to the family allegedly in a polythene bag.

While the family was on its way to perform the final rites, they found that one of them (a baby boy) was still alive. The case triggered an outrage, prompting the AAP government's Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) to cancel the hospital's licence on December 8 for alleged medical negligence. The upscale hospital group on December 13 had filed an appeal against the cancellation of the licence in the Financial Commissioner's court, which stayed the order.

"The Max hospital side has raised certain objections to some of the questions raised by our side (DGHS). So, the court has asked us to file a written reply," a top official of the Directorate General of Health Services told PTI. The DGHS had on February 8, when the last hearing was held, said that the Delhi government would emphasise on two other factors as major grounds for cancellation of its licence.

"From our (DGHS) side, now the main grounds for taking action are the lapses on part of the hospital, involving the EWS (extremely weaker section) quota patients and dengue fever beds. And, we had sent notices to Max for these cases, even before the twin baby case was reported in the media," the Director General in the DGHS, Kirti Bhushan, had said. The alleged medical negligence in the twin baby case was over and above those two grounds, he had said.

Meanwhile, the Max Healthcare group, in a statement today, said, "The relief granted to Max Hospital, Shalimar Bagh, earlier will continue, as the next date of hearing is fixed for April 17." Following the initial stay order, the Max hospital had resumed its operation on December 20. "Max Hospital, Shalimar Bagh, continues to serve over 15,000 patients in its OPD, 3,000 patients in IPD per month including those from the economically weaker sections of the society," the group claimed. Also, the Delhi Medical Council (DMC), which had sent the Max hospital twins case to its disciplinary committee, has held a couple of hearings in the matter last month, a senior DMC official said.