Health experts have said they are facing problems in conducting surgery and giving post-surgery care to the patients at the child cardiac surgery centre of
Dhaka Shishu Hospital because of inadequate manpower and logistics.
As there is no error margin here, a very small error can cause death to a child, they have said.
They made the observations at a scientific seminar on ‘Paediatric Cardiac Surgery: Dhaka Shishu Hospital Experience’ held at Dhaka Shishu Hospital in the capital on Sunday.
The paediatric cardiac surgeon, Khalifa Mohammad Tarik, said that only three surgeons were working at the centre but there was no physician at the intensive care unit.
‘So we have to do the duty at the ICU in rotation,’ he added.
He also said only 11 nurses were working by turns at the centre round the clock at both the operation theatre and the ICU.
As the ward nurses cannot work at the ICU, more nurses trained in intensive care would be needed at the ICU, he added.
Despite all these limitations, a total of 26 children took cardiac surgery since the hospital started paediatric cardiac surgery in July, 2012.
The hospital director, Monjur Hossain, said, among the 26 patients, four did not survive due to different types of post-surgery complications.
‘The rest are well and monitored regularly,’ he added.
He also informed that they took patients aged between 18 months and 18 years where most of them were bellow 10 years.
The consultant of anaesthesiology, Mohammad Iqbal, said more trainings and exchange programmes with the other countries were needed to produce experts for this centre.
Conducting cardiac surgery would cost between Tk 60,000 and Tk 1,20,000 at the hospital, the director said, adding that poor patients would get the treatment for free.
The physicians said around 8 to 10 children in per 1,000 suffered from congenital heart diseases in the world.
-With New Age input
