Will the six newborns' deaths bring any change in our health sector?

The deaths of six newborn babies at Ad-din Medical College Hospital in Moghbazar, Dhaka last month are being treated as a crisis when they are, in fact, a symptom of a healthcare system structurally configured to let incidents like this happen. The government’s response to these deaths has been, by Bangladeshi standards, unusually forceful: an initial 72-hour probe deadline, a fine, a show-cause notice threatening licence cancellation, inclusion of a deputy attorney general in the expanded probe committee, and a health minister who has stayed publicly engaged well past the news cycle.

It is tempting to read this as a turning point. But is it, really?

The government’s anger appears genuine, but anger, investigations, and even licence cancellations will not fix the structural conditions that has made those six deaths predictable. That those conditions will remain intact even after whatever punishment Ad-din hospital receives is entirely likely.

Bangladesh has had this conversation before. After Regent Hospital was found issuing fake Covid reports in 2020 and the then DGHS director-general was forced to resign. After a five-year-old died during a routine circumcision. After a young mother died in preventable childbirth. Each time, probe committees were formed, health authorities promised strict action, and the structural conditions were left undisturbed.

At Ad-din hospital, the government’s own probe found that the ward where the six babies had died was a 900-sq-ft sealed room with no passive ventilation, absence of an on-duty physician, and a single air-conditioning unit that was switched off at around 2:00am. For four hours, not a single nurse meaningfully responded as oxygen depleted and carbon dioxide built up in the room. The babies, physiologically the most vulnerable humans alive, could not survive such conditions. The probe committee was unambiguous: the building is unsuitable for operating as a hospital. The deaths resulted from negligence by the hospital’s physicians, nurses, and management.

These were not hidden defects. They were simply never inspected because the system that should have done so has effectively stopped functioning. Out of 19,627 licensed private hospitals and clinics in Bangladesh, only 914—less than five percent—have renewed their licences as of April 2025. Over a thousand facilities are operating with no valid licence at all, according to a 2024 report. Ad-din Hospital was fined for operating without a temperature monitoring system on May 31. That this was only discovered after six neonates died on the same night reveals everything about the frequency of routine inspections. The DGHS’s own line director of Health Information Systems acknowledged that “we do not get patient data from private hospitals.” This fragmented approach, as the Health Sector Reform Commission’s report found, makes evidence-based planning and monitoring of the private healthcare facilities nearly impossible.

This regulatory paralysis has a specific cause. The 2024 white paper on the state of Bangladesh’s economy found rampant systematic corruption running through health sector procurement, hospital licensing, and career mobility of medical professionals, a finding that confirmed what the Anti-Corruption Commission was already investigating in 2019 when it opened cases against 23 DGHS officers. When the officials tasked with regulating a sector are financially and professionally entangled with it, the regulatory relationship does not remain adversarial; it becomes collegial.

Bangladesh has no specific statute defining medical negligence. Victims who seek justice must navigate tort law, consumer protection provisions, and general criminal statutes—none designed for healthcare, none offering straightforward recourse. In the case of Ad-din hospital, families collected the bodies of their infants without an autopsy, before forensic evidence could be gathered. The governing ordinance for private hospitals dates to 1982 and has not been updated since. A sector that now dominates three-quarters of the country’s healthcare is regulated by a law written when it was a fraction of its current size.

The government, elected into office less than four months ago, has both an opportunity and an obligation. It has the Health Sector Reform Commission’s report ready to act on. It has an electoral mandate not shadowed by the patronage networks that insulated the private health sector for 15 years. It has no credible excuse to delay. Three things must happen before that window closes:

First, Bangladesh needs to enact a law, not a policy document, that defines negligence, establishes duty-of-care standards for neonatal wards, and creates a compensation framework for victims. The Law Commission has advocated for this for years. The Ad-din case is the floor of that debate.

Second, an independent accreditation authority must be established. Bangladesh has neither a mandatory accreditation body nor any requirement that private hospitals meet independently verified safety standards. A statutory, arm’s-length authority must be established, empowered to audit, certify, and close facilities, with unannounced inspections as a condition of licence renewal.

Third, the DGHS and health ministry officials must be barred from holding financial or professional interests in the facilities they regulate. Without this, regulatory capture is not a risk but a certainty.

Six babies died because the room they were in had no air, because no one thought to measure the air, because no one was required to measure the air, because the institution that should have required it was not doing its job, because the law did not demand that it do so, and because no one who had failed before had faced real consequences.

This was not one person’s failure but a systemic one. The health minister called this “extreme negligence.” He is right. But extreme negligence does not emerge from nowhere. It emerges from an environment in which negligence has been normal, tolerated, and quietly understood to carry no serious cost.

The parents of those six children deserve more than a fine and a show-cause notice. They deserve a healthcare system that will not do this to the next family.

This article draws on media reports as well as the Health Sector Reform Commission report (2025), the White Paper on the State of Bangladesh Economy (December 2024), and peer-reviewed research on private sector regulation and medical negligence law in Bangladesh.

Ashish Barua is a fundraising professional currently working in the health sector in Canada.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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