KTH sets up special dengue OPD

Doctors and staff to be available around the clock to tend to patients

PESHAWAR: While the dengue season is on the wane with the onset of winter, there are still five people admitted at the Khyber Teaching Hospital for treatment of the virus.

Now, a special, separate dengue Outpatient department (OPD) has been established at the Khyber Teaching Hospital’s (KTH) Medical Teaching Institute (MTI).

According to the media cell at the hospital, the MTI-KTH will set up the dengue facilitation centre to provide free treatment to outdoor and admitted patients including all tests in the pathology department and all medicines from hospital’s pharmacy.

The OPD was set up following directives from the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) Health Department and subsequent approval from the MTI-KTH’s board of governors.

As many as four dengue facilitation clinics have been set up in the OPD. Each will have two doctors. Moreover, four computer counters have been set up with 15 computer operators working in shifts. They will be supervised by a network administrator.

Further, five laboratory counters with three haematology machines, three centrifuge machines and a dengue serology station with 22 technicians, 14 internees and four supervisory staff will work in shifts under the supervision of Pathology Director Dr Muhammad Asghar.

In the free dengue facilitation centre, doctors, nurses, paramedical staff and laboratory technicians will tend to patients around the clock, all seven days of the week, offering screening facility to patients for free.

A special pharmacy has been set up for facilitation of dengue patients which will operate around the clock with two pharmacists in each shift.

As many as 4,857 dengue patients were admitted to different hospitals of the province with complaints of dengue. Of these, 4,787 have been discharged while only five are currently still admitted to different units of KTH.

Moreover, the hospital has screened 87,115 cases people over the past six months, of which it found that 18,371 were positive for dengue.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 8^th, 2017.