No paediatric ICU at govt hospitals!

It is shocking that only one public hospital in our country is equipped with an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for children. All the rest, including the largest government hospital in our country — Dhaka Medical College Hospital — lack this most crucial service. People are thus forced to either go to private hospitals and pay astronomically high amounts to get such services for their children or — for those who cannot afford such high fees — simply hope that their child can survive without them.

It goes without saying that the fees charged by private hospitals, especially for ICU facilities, is beyond the means of most people. What this also implies is that most children in our country must do without such services, even when their life is on the line. The situation is actually much grimmer when one considers the fact that for patients needing the ICU facilities, even a few minutes can be fatal.

And, of course, it already has — for how many children we do not know. Only recently, however, a one-and-a-half-year-old boy who had suffered severe head injuries in a road accident on February 12, died because of the delay in giving him the necessary treatment in an ICU as the hospital that he was initially taken to, did not have one for children.

Although it is essential to have ICUs for children at every government hospital, experts say that requests to the authorities for setting them up have continually fallen on deaf ears. This attitude on part of the authorities is totally unacceptable. The authorities should take this up seriously and setup ICUs for children at every government hospital.