Hospitals become hotbed of infections

Despite being a province that is found in the grips of one malady after another, it comes as a surprise that Sindh still lacks a working infection control department across the span of its public healthcare sector.

Resultantly, there is often no way of telling what number of patients visit the province’s government hospitals, or how many of them develop certain infections within the hospital premises. However, some experts in the arena fear that the rate of cross-infection within public hospitals has been on a constant rise in Sindh, while the absence of a tabs-keeping system has kept the sector in the dark about the burgeoning crisis.

Per various reports, some of the province’s largest public hospitals have been guilty of providing an environment conducive to cross-infection within their medical and surgical wards. In most cases, the discharge of a patient from a government hospital leads to the transfer of their bed to a new patient with due sanitisation or change of bedding. Callous acts such as the reuse of disposable medical equipment like drip sets, blood and catheter bags, and syringes are also reported to be common practices at these facilities. All such equipment is categorised as medical waste and should ideally be safely packaged and sent for incineration. However, there is no department within the public sector that monitors the amount of medical waste discharged from each hospital, which means there is little way of telling how much of the waste is actually going into the incinerators and how much of it is circulating within the hospital. Owing to this, hundreds and thousands of people are medically endangered every day; and are likely to develop life-threatening infections despite being admitted for conditions less severe.

The absence of an infection control department at these hospitals means that statistics revealing the true extent of the crisis never make it to the surface, which also ensures that the issue is never recognised on the governmental level and no remedial policy is enacted.

Surveys real that some of the province’s biggest public hospitals including but not limited to Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center (JPMC), Sindh Government Lyari General Hospital, National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD), and National Institute of Child Health (NICH) have been acting as a hotbed of cross-infections, and yet faring without a department to gauge its impact. Paramedics at these public hospitals are also said to practice little caution in their service, often seen administering medical care sans safety equipment like medical-grade gloves- a practice that the World Health Organisation’s modus operandi strongly detests.

The Sindh Health Department’s stance on the matter however seems less than reassuring. Where it acknowledges the lack of infection control departments across its hospitals, the provincial body appears convinced that its hospital managements somehow continue to take appropriate action (to combat cross-infection) without being aware of the true scope of the issue.

The only exception to the case appears to be the Dow University of Health Sciences, a teaching hospital whose spokesperson claims their Ojha campus and the Infectious Disease Hospital at Nipa Chowrangi are both equipped with a fully functional infection control department. “Our paramedics and staff are trained to use PPE and we do everything to ensure that the infection rate in our hospitals is almost negligible,” he asserted.

Speaking in the regard, Afra Khanum, who is a senior manager of the infection control department at the Indus Hospital, a privately run tertiary care facility, believes that infection control is a concept that is often lost in the local public healthcare sector. “There are airborne diseases, waterborne diseases, diseases that are transmitted by touch or those that infect via ingestion of bacteria, and hospitals, although a place of treatment, also act as the perfect melting pot for all such contagions. In such circumstances, an infection control department not only monitors (infectious) patients but also spearheads programmes to limit the transfer of infection. Sadly, there aren’t many specialists trained in infection control to head these departments, which is why the government needs to act immediately to produce concrete policies to facilitate the infection control sector across the province,” she opined while speaking to The Express Tribune.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 13^th, 2022.