Alongside the march: Jinnah Hospital reports vacant beds for days

It will take weeks for the hospital to cover its backlog, says a doctor

LAHORE: Jinnah Hospital administration reported to have received an influx of patients after the roads leading to the hospital were opened on Friday.

An administration official said that several operations and procedures had had to be postponed because for several days only a side-gate of the hospital was allowed to remain open. Roads leading to the hospital had also been blocked due to which several doctors and paramedics could not reach the hospital to perform duties, he said. “The shortage of staff led to inconvenience and problems for patients.”

Dr Shabbir Chaudhry, a Young Doctors’ Association (YDA) office bearer at Jinnah Hospital, said, “We witnessed rare scenes over the past few days. At the Gynae Ward, where the usual ratio of patients is three to one bed, almost all the beds were vacant and there were no patients to admit.”

Even in the Emergency Ward, where it is extremely hard to find beds, several beds were unoccupied, he said. “This is because the roads leading to the hospital were blocked with containers.”

“The finalised lists of patients had to be postponed and it will take at least six weeks for the hospital to cover that backlog. Jinnah Hospital is one of the largest hospitals in the city and hundreds of thousands of patients visit every week,” he said.

Other public hospitals in the city – Mayo Hospital, Services Hospital, Lahore General Hospital (LGH) and Sir Ganga Ram Hospital – also remained on high alert on Thursday. Doctors’ leaves were cancelled to ensure sufficient numbers of doctors available to deal with patients if anything untoward happened.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 16^th,2014.