PESHAWAR: Patients at the Gynae ward, Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar expressed great disappointment over the discourteous attitude of doctors and hospital staff at the ward.
Zain, a resident of Waziristan shared that he brought his daughter-in-law to the hospital for her delivery but due to constant delays on the hospitals behalf, the girl lost her baby.
Zain blames the administration and the doctors at the hospital and hold them responsible for their loss. ?The baby could be saved if they had operated my daughter-in-law well in time, he claimed.
He narrated the entire incident and said that he brought his daughter-in-law to LRH on the recommendation of the doctors back at his village due to the lack of facilities to perform a cesarean section at the local hospitals.
Since the girl required immediate attention, we arrived at LRH at 9 am and requested the doctors to perform the operation instantly but despite several requests, the doctors made the girl wait and after eight hours of linger finally operated her but she had already lost the child, exclaimed Zain with grief.
He demanded Imran Khan, Chairman PTI, Chief Minister, KP and Chief Executive, LRH to take strong action against the doctors on duty at the Gynae ward.
The reporter of this scribe when visited the concerned ward was not entertained and the doctors refused to meet or share any comments with regard to the incident quoted by Zain. However, nurses at the ward admitted that due to huge number of patients, nurses are often not able to address to each and every patient.
The environment within the ward was also very suffocating since the air conditioners were out of order since the last one month and there were more patients than the ward could accommodate.
An aged woman, who came with her daughter-in-law as attendee, said that she has been staying at the ward from the last one week and the air conditioners had been out of order and no effort was made to fix the problem. Since the one week spent here, no one had the courtesy to change the dirty bed sheets at the ward and we cannot even comment considering the attitude of the staff, she shared.
She also shared that the condition of ward washrooms are dilapidated and mostly, there is no water in washrooms. She said that there is no facility of clean drinking water in ward, so the patients have to purchase mineral water from nearby stores.
An official at Lady Reading Hospital shared on the condition of anonymity that a lot of complaints had been received concerning the attitude of doctors and nurses at the gynae ward but no proper action has been taken against them by the hospital`s administration. In his opinion, the reason behind their discourteous behavior is work stress.
When contacted, Zulfiqar Ali Babakhel, LRH spokesperson shared that the hospital administration does not have accurate record of the infant mortality rate; however, he estimated the IMR during delivery to be near to 2% which implies two babies died during of 100 delivery cases.
On the contrary, an official of hospital administration claimed that 12 to 13 children died every day in Lady Reading Hospital.
According to the official`s statistics, 137 women were admitted in Gynae B1 ward, 46 in the Gynae B2 ward whereas 773 patients were admitted to Labor Room for delivery cases on a daily basis.
Mr. Babakhel said that the population of Peshawar has increased over the years however; the facilities remain the same in number at the hospital.
Ms Shaheen Ghani, director nurse, LRH, suggests that the government needs to improve the overall referral system across the province to reduce the load at Lady Reading Hospital. We are facing shortage of nurses in wards which has badly affected the performance of the hospital, however, we plan on hiring 300 more nurses for the wards which will hopefully overcome the shortage she claimed.
