No gas: no surgeries, no meals

Polyclinic worst affected, other hospitals functioning normally.

ISLAMABAD: Polyclinic Hospital in Islamabad is finding it hard to carry out routine activities due to acute gas outages. Dr Sharif Astori, Polyclinic spokesperson, said they could not sterilise surgical tools due to gas outages, which was affecting the number of surgeries they could perform in the hospital daily.

“We used to do about 30 surgeries before the outages began. Now we manage to schedule just half the number of surgeries in a day,” he said.

CDA Hospital, too, has been hit by gas outages, but the situation there is not as bad as Polyclinic. A senior physician at CDA Hospital, asking not to be named, said that to work around gas outages, the administration had to cook meals in advance. By the time food is served to the patients it has already gone cold, he said.

Dr Astori said that Polyclinic, too, is facing problems in preparing three meals a day in time for patients admitted to different wards.

“Currently more then 500 patients are admitted in the hospital and majority of them have come from far-flung areas such as Azad Jummu and Kashmir and belong to poor families,” he said. These patients are totally reliant on the hospital for their meals, he added.

He rejected LPG as a viable alternative because of its high price. He also rejected using electricity as an alternative. “There is already a shortage of electricity in the country therefore we cannot use it,” he said.

Dr Anis Kausar, joint executive director, Polyclinic, said that it had become hard for them to keep the wards warm, as gas heaters were not a viable option any more.“It is very important to provide a warm environment to the new born babies, pneumonia and heart disease patients,” she added, saying that if the situation is left unabated, there will be an increase in the number of pneumonia patients.

Other hospitals in Islamabad, however, did not report any problems with gas supply. Dr Bashir Malik spokesperson of Benazir Bhutto Hospital; Dr Raja Shafiq, spokesperson Holy Family Hospital; and Dr Ghazala Mehmood at Pims, said they were not experiencing gas outages in their respective hospitals.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 5^th, 2011.