Patients suffer as docs, nurses on holidays
With most doctors and nurses having gone on leave, patients at the government-run hospitals suffered more than usual during the Eid holidays.
Visiting five major hospitals in the capital, The Daily Star correspondents collected first-hand accounts of patients' sufferings between Thursday and Saturday.
The emergency sections of the hospitals had to deal with an additional pressure of patients as outdoor services remained closed on Thursday and Friday.
However, X-ray facilities at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital's emergency section were unavailable. This forced critically injured patients to travel to the other end of the country's biggest hospital to find alternatives.
Tanvir, 25, came to the DMCH around 9:00pm on Friday, the Eid day, with a broken leg after a motorcycle crash.
"I had to be taken on a trolley with excruciating pain in my leg to the X-ray room. It's 1:00am now and I am still waiting in the queue for my turn," Tanvir told The Daily Star.
In defence, Assistant Director Khaza Abdul Gafur of the hospital said the X-ray machine of the emergency section had broken down.
Though the city was mostly empty with holidaymakers having left for their homes for the Eid, the flow of patients at the DMCH's emergency section was as high as on a normal day, said hospital sources.
Some 930 patients sought emergency services there on Thursday, 750 on Friday and 980 on Saturday. On a typical day, the average number of patients at the emergency section stays between 700 and 1,000, according to the DMCH sources.
At Mitford Hospital, Halima was found sitting in front of the elevator on the sixth floor at midnight on Friday. She had come to the hospital with gynaecological complications at 8:00PM from her home in Gazipur.
"The doctors have given me a prescription and told me to come after a couple of days when the activities at the hospital becomes normal. But I am in no shape to start for Gazipur now," said the 30-year-old, casting a pain-stricken look at her husband and in-laws who were accompanying her there.
These correspondents met Protyasha Rani Das, 37, lying on the floor in front of the Emergency Unit of National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD) on Saturday afternoon. She had come from Sherpur with severe pain in the stomach and her back.
She said she had gone to the government hospital in her hometown on Wednesday night. But the doctors were away for the Eid holidays and the officials there told her to come to Dhaka.
"As my pain was unbearable, I went to a private clinic in Sherpur and stayed there for two days. But most people of that hospital were on leave as well."
Protyasha, referred by doctors, then came to the NICVD on Saturday morning, only to be told that she could not be treated there.
Her husband took her to the nearby Shaheed Suhrawardy Hospital and found that her ailments could not be treated there either.
"We are now taking her to a private hospital though we know it will be expensive. But we can no longer afford to keep going from one hospital to another," said a relative of hers.
With a broken arm, nine-year-old Hasan was seen waiting in front of the operation theatre at the National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedics Rehabilitation (NITOR) around 2:15pm for his turn to undergo a surgery.
According to his father, they had been waiting for around four hours but the hospital staffs were delaying the surgery "on different pretexts".
These correspondents visited the 500-Bed Mugda General Hospital on Saturday evening. Patients at the Burn and Plastic Surgery Ward said no doctors came to them on Thursday and Friday.
Those at the medicine and the paediatric wards, however, said doctors and nurses visited them on Friday as scheduled.
Dr Saidur Rahman, deputy director (hospitals and clinics) at the Directorate General of Health Services, initially said he hadn't heard of any anomaly in the hospital services during the Eid holidays.
However, when the cases collected by The Daily Star were narrated to him, he said he would discuss these in their next meeting.
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