Khodeja, a domestic help, was lying on a trolley in Dhaka Medical College Hospital in the past week. Her ear was bruised and bloody from an accident and she was rushed to the hospital around 1:00pm.
Five hours and a half later, about 6:30pm, she was still lying on the trolley in the emergency unit in the same condition.
Her daughter Ambia said that her mother had fallen from the rooftop of a two-storied building. Khodeja was taken to Mitford Hospital which referred her to the DMCH.
The emergency unit doctors at the DMCH sent her mother to the casualty department and there the doctors asked her to come back with a CT scan and an X-ray report, Ambia said.
‘The doctors did not give her any treatment or even clean out her blood. We do not know what to do,’ she said plaintively.
Ripon, a satellite cable businessman, went to Savar Health Complex with an injury around 6:00pm on April 12. There was no doctor in the emergency room and he had to be given treatment by a Class IV employee called Munna.
Events like this are common in the emergency units in government hospitals which are ill-equipped to handle emergency cases as they lack the required equipment and manpower, health experts told New Age.
Raghib Manzoor, general secretary of the Bangladesh Society of Emergency Medicine, said, ‘The concept of emergency medicare has yet to be developed in the country. No hospital has any genuine emergency room.’
He said that an emergency room is where patients get all kinds of facilities that they need.
The doctors of the emergency units in various hospitals told New Age that they mainly refer the patients to the appropriate departments of their own hospitals or to other specialised hospitals.
‘We refer patients to the specialised hospitals or to the DMCH as beds are not available in our own hospital most of the time,’ said emergency medical officer Haridash Saha of Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College and Hospital.
At that hospital, the emergency surgery patients do not get operated
upon due to lack of anaesthetists, surgeons and an emergency operation theatre, said the doctors of the hospital.
‘We have to refer the critical patients, who need emergency surgery, to other hospitals,’ said Mamunur Rahman, the hospital’s EMO.
The hospital also has no intensive care unit and the patients who need ICU support are referred to other hospitals.
Hospital sources said that the emergency cardiac patients, seriously injured patients, patients with serious respiratory problems and orthopaedic patients are generally referred for treatment to the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases, Dhaka Medical College Hospital, National Institute of Chest Diseases and Hospital and National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedic Rehabilitation.
The emergency operation theatre at Shaheed Suhrawardy Hospital is only used for gynaecology patients.
‘As the patients are not allowed to lie on the floor at the hospital, we cannot admit more patients than the number of beds that we have.
So in many cases we have nothing to do but refer them to other hospitals,’ Rahman said.
Employees at the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases said that the hospital receives emergency cardiac medicine and cardiac vascular patients, but the patients who need other kinds of surgery have to wait to be scheduled for operation.
Due to this delay the condition of the referred patients deteriorates in many cases, said the doctors.
The Dhaka Medical College Hospital is also under great pressure.
‘Usually we receive many patients from remote areas, but we also receive critical patients who are referred to us by various hospitals of the city including the government ones,’ said Shahidul Haque Mallik, director of the DMCH.
‘We always face huge pressure in the emergency units as they can handle only 50 emergency patients at a time.’
He said that full-fledged emergency services should be established in every government hospital so that pressure on the DMCH is reduced.
The director general of the Directorate General of Health Services, Khandaker M Shefayetullah, said that emergency units were essential for all the hospitals of the country.
He said that the hospitals close to the main roads in particular should have strong emergency departments to deal with the victims of road accidents.
The government has taken an initiative to install emergency and intensive care units in all the government hospitals so that the critically injured patients get immediate treatment and need not go to the DMCH, he said.
Courtesy of New Age
