Kerala, India: In the mad chase for better pastures, the youth do not get time to care for their sick and aged parents, but they need not worry as a new genre of professional hospital bystanders is ready to come to their aid.
A lucrative idea that took birth from the despair of the present society, this business line has already set its roots in the state. A version of the already thriving home nurse service, this business model is run by over 250 agencies in various parts of Kerala including Trivandrum, Cochin, Calicut and Kottayam.
The demand for bystanders has been growing with more and more youth going out of the state for job and the state aging fast. People who have crossed 60 years already accounts for 15 per cent of the total population. A substantial number of these people are grappling with multiple diseases and live alone.
The bystanders are mostly sought by the NRKs, who are forced to leave their aged parents and families behind. As per the emigration monitoring study conducted by centre for Development Studies in 2008, there were 2.2 million Keralites working in different foreign countries and about one million working in other parts of the country. The professional bystanders have been on hire for two years for taking care of the sick patients, buying medicines, running hospital errands and above all being with the patients offering them strength and support.
Antony Pears, hailing from Quilon, a trained home nurse by profession, has been successful in his new role as a hospital bystander. He earns anything between Rs200 for a short four-hour stint to Rs300 or more for a full day.
“Most people nowadays have money but no time to take care of their loved ones. From psychiatric patients to accidents victims, till now I have served more than 500 patients as a bystander,” says Pears.
Hospital bystanders are at the service of everyone, any time and mostly these trained hands are hired by families whose children are in foreign countries, live in faraway places or too busy to tend to their parents.
These professional bystanders are specially preferred by most in taking care of psychiatric patients as it requires patience and a special knack considering the violent behaviour of such patients.
“We are provided with an ID card from the agency that recruits us but the relatives of patients often ask us not to wear it. They don’t want to be seen doing what they actually do — recruiting a bystander to take of their loved ones,” says another bystander Subhadra Ammal.
According to A Chandrababu, general secretary, All Kerala Placement and Home Nursing Services Association, out of the 498 registered home nurse service agencies in the state, 250 agencies are currently providing bystanders for hospitals.
There are over 5000 bystanders on the roll in the state now. According to the agencies that hires bystanders, the demand for professional bystanders has steadily increased over the years and these days, they are hired by not just the NRKs but working couples in the state, who find it difficult to care for the sick and the ailing.
© Khaleej Times
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