LARKANA: The inauguration of 62-bed capacity recently repaired and renovated Emergency Response Center (ERC) of the largest tertiary care Chandka Medical College Hospital (CMCH) has been delayed which was likely to be inaugurated by PPP chairman and Pakistan’s foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari who has left for Islamabad for which preparations were afoot by all relevant departments who were busy in chopping of trees and removing advertisement material from VIP Road and making it neat and clean, PPI learnt here on Friday during a visit to the ERC.
Medics and paramedical staff members who were present on the occasion after end of their duty boycotts but declined to speak on record owing to the dirty repercussions which they feared said that the ERC is lacking fundamental facilities for the patients, medics and paramedics such as there are no separate rooms for dressing of injured patients, no laboratory, no blood bank, no life-saving ARV Center, no separate washrooms for the patients and their attends not even for the duty doctors. They said that apart from all that ERC will be able to provide medical facilities to the ailing populace but it is unfit to become a Trauma Centre for which a doctor also visited from Karachi, they claimed.
CMCH statistics claimed that its annual OPD is approximately 1.70 million patients. So far 13,203 major and minor surgeries were performed till the end of September 2022 from January in nine months. Similarly, 120,497 x-rays, 76,251 ultrasounds, 839 CT scans on outdated machine, 1253 MRI, 408,784 laboratory investigations, 10,802 dialysis, 38,097 ECGs, 2,693 normal deliveries, 3,529 dog bite cases vaccination and 701 snake bite cases were treated during the same period which speaks high of its performance which can further be improved if the vacant sanctioned posts of doctors and paramedics are filled. There are no ambulances, not even for shifting patients from one ward to another which need to be looked into forthwith as CMCH is scattered at five different places of the city.
CMCH Medical Superintendent Dr. Gulzar Ali Tunio said that old Casualty has been repaired and renovated and no new construction has been made for ERC. He said that the SNE of the ERC is pending approval and implementation quickly by the bosses to enable the administration to operate the ERC for the benefit of the indisposed patients of many adjoining districts apart from Balochistan.
He said an express feeder for uninterrupted power supply should also be ensured as frequent electricity load shedding has already crippled life here due to which operations are either postponed or cancelled for unavailability of new heavy duty generators. He said the capacity of the present Pole Mounted Transformer (PMT) must also be increased. He further said that permission for appointment on vacant sanctioned paramedical staff posts should also be granted and gazetted posts of doctors be filled on merit through proper forum. Dr. Tunio said annual budget allocation of the CMCH also needs sympathetic revision adding if these demands are accepted then the performance of the hospital will increase manifold saving precious human lives.
