Lift trouble for patients
Mahtab Islam was relieved to hear from doctors that they had successfully operated on his 55-year-old mother, Alesa Begum, yesterday morning.
Alesa was one of the five patients at Ward 501 who underwent cervical surgeries at the Emergency and Casualty Complex of Dhaka Medical College Hospital yesterday.
Fear overrode the joy of Mahtab and others when it was time to shift the patients to the ward on the fourth floor from the post-operative ward on the third floor: The lift was out of order.
Diseases related to cervix are regarded highly sensitive and burdensome in terms of the patients' lengthy recovery after operation. So Mahtab decided to wait and not take any risk.
After waiting for over two hours, he realised there was little chance of the lift, which broke down two days ago, being restored. Left with no alternative, he faced an uphill task.
He got two attendants of other patients and hired two caregivers to help him and his brother carry overhead the gurney to the ward using the staircase. His mother was yet to regain full consciousness then. She had a fresh cut wound that required a least a dozen stitches to close.
“I knew it was very risky. But I had no other option,” Mahtab told The Daily Star.
Like Mahtab, attendants of four other patients of Ward-501 carried their relatives from the post-operative ward, said a nurse.
There are three elevators at the five-storey Emergency and Casualty Complex -- two of them go up to the third floor and the other up to the top floor.
But the single lift, installed around one and a half years ago, often remains out of order for hours, a liftman said.
It is a second-hand lift and it broke down some 50 to 60 times since its installation, he added.
There are several women wards on the fourth floor and this correspondent saw over 130 patients taking treatment there.
A gynaecologist at the DMCH said if a just-operated patient was hand-carried, the stitches might tear up. “This problem may not be noticed immediately, but it can create problems later.”
DMCH Assistant Director (administration) Khawza Abdul Gofur admitted this and said he had been trying to change the lift for the last five months.
“The money for the elevator has already been sanctioned and I hope a new elevator will be installed by December.”
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