Nobody walks into a hospital expecting a fight. Yet at around half past seven on Friday morning, the calm inside Niba Hospital in Itanagar’s Papunalah area came apart. Two groups, still unidentified, got into a physical fight on the premises, in a place where sick people and their anxious families were simply trying to get through another day.
The hospital has now spoken up. In a statement reported by India Today NE, it said the altercation happened around 7.30 am on September 18 and left patients, their attendants, doctors, nurses and other staff badly shaken. Hospital property was damaged in the process too. Honestly, it’s hard to think of a worse place for a fight.
Management didn’t soften its words. Violence, it said, has “no place within our premises”, and it won’t put up with intimidation, vandalism or any kind of disruptive behaviour. The safety and well-being of patients, attendants and staff, the hospital added, comes before everything else. Hard to argue with any of that.
Words are one thing, though, and Niba has followed them with paperwork. An FIR has been lodged with the police. The hospital says it is cooperating with the authorities and will provide CCTV footage and any other relevant information to help the investigation. That footage could matter a great deal. People remember the same five minutes very differently after a scuffle, and a camera doesn’t take sides.
It isn’t every day that a hospital puts out a public statement about a fight on its own grounds, and that alone suggests management is taking this seriously. The distress it describes is worth pausing on, too. A nurse or doctor who was in the building when it happened doesn’t simply switch off and carry on.
Still, plenty remains unanswered. The statement, as reported, doesn’t say who the two groups were, what sparked the trouble, or whether anyone was hurt. Those gaps will matter as the inquiry moves along, and people in Itanagar deserve straight answers on all three.
Violence inside hospitals is a worry that reaches well beyond Itanagar. Doctors’ associations across the country have long argued that hospitals need better safeguards against violence on their grounds, and Friday’s clash, whatever its cause, only adds weight to that argument.
The hospital also had a request for everybody else. It urged visitors and the wider public to keep the peace, maintain discipline and stay away from violence in or around healthcare facilities, and it closed with a promise to keep the place safe and caring for its patients and staff. It’s a simple appeal, and one that really shouldn’t need making.
Hospital gates are where worry, grief and short tempers often meet, which is exactly why the calm inside has to be protected. Think about who usually fills a hospital at that hour: tired families who spent the night on plastic chairs, and staff nearing the end of a long shift. None of them signed up for a fight.
Whoever the two groups turn out to be, and whatever they were fighting about, it should never have crossed that gate. The investigation will sort out the blame. What the rest of us owe every hospital is simpler, and much older: let the sick heal in peace.
