The acid that Shehnaz Bibi’s husband threw at her just missed her face, but where it touched her neck she has been badly burnt. The skin is dark and melted and the folds of her flesh have fused together so that she can hardly turn her neck. But she is worried and dejected even aside from this. She has just walked out of Mayo Hospital in Lahore.
“The doctors will not admit me, because they are short of beds,” she says. “I was admitted to emergency but instead of shifting me to the burns ward they told me there were no beds available, that there is at least a month’s wait for one of those beds to be free.”
The fact is that the doctors have no choice. The Mayo Hospital has only 14 beds in its burns ward. Considering that Lahore is the largest city in the Punjab, it is a shock to discover that Government hospitals offer only two burn units to service the entire city. These two units are at the Mayo Hospital and at the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, and even these are barely functional for lack of proper facilities.
“This puts a big question mark on the government’s priority to provide the public with properly equipped burn wards, which can help save lives,” says Dr Salman Kazmi, the General Secretary of the Young Doctors Association (YDA).
Inside sources say that there is no free medication for patients at the burns unit at the Mayo Hospital or at the Ganga Ram, which has only four beds. As a result the burns unit at the Mayo Hospital is overburdened, pushing even serious patients for treatment into the emergency unit.
Meanwhile a burns unit at the Jinnah Hospital is still not functional four years since the government imported all its necessary equipment. The Ganga Ram Hospital occasionally refuses to accommodate burn patients on the basis that there is no space and so the last resort remains the Mayo Hospital putting that hospital under severe pressure. As for the Services and General Hospitals, they possess no burns units at all.
Burn cases
The scenario may have been less intolerable if the number of burn cases was lower, but statistics show that more than 5000 victims of severe burns show up at the teaching hospitals in Lahore every year, yet there is no specialized facility to look after them.
It is important to note that crimes involving burnings have been taking place consistently. In its last report on violence against women, the Aurat Foundation states that about 83 cases of acid throwing and 71 cases of burning by other means took place in 2012. These are just the reported cases, the ones involving women. They do not include accidental burns, or those cases in which men and children are the victims, accidental or otherwise. This, also, is the data for the whole of the Punjab and points to the number of people who have to travel all the way to Lahore to seek treatment for burns.
Not surprisingly many victims succumb to their injuries and die as a result.
YDA in February reported that more than 50 people had already died since the beginning of 2014.
“Because the burns unit at Jinnah Hospital remains incomplete and because we do not have state of the art facilities, patients are dying even because of minor burns,” Kazmi says speaking to Pique.
In fact, his claim is that hospital records show that patients with burns are in the majority amongst those who die during surgery.
Other healthcare providers, too, believe that the government is not interested in making existing units fully functional or completing ongoing schemes like the Jinnah Hospital scheme and the extension of the Mayo Hospital ward. They claim that the management does not purchase medicines for treating burns. Instead families have to resort to buying costly drugs from stores outside the Mayo Hospital.
Health department officials and hospital management however deny these allegations.
“All the necessary facilities including free medicines are available at our burns unit,” says an official on condition of anonymity.
Dr Aslam Rao, a plastic surgeon at both the Jinnah and the Children’s Hospitals says that the burns ward scheme should be kicked off as soon as possible, but that the Government had not pushed the matter. “We have US expatriates who send us donations especially for Jinnah Hospital,” he said. “We already have a lot of equipment but the Health Department says that the infrastructure is lacking. Basically we need manpower and so far not much interest has been shown by the government regarding this matter.”
Another source from within the Jinnah Hospital says that the reason for this is that these schemes were started by the PML-Q (Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi) Government which is why the current chief minister Mr Shahbaz Sharif who belongs to the PML-N is not showing an interest in them.
“It’s a bit ridiculous because the bottom line is that it is the common man who is suffering because of this ego issue,” he says.
Meanwhile the worst of the burden falls on the Mayo hospital. Even there the burns center falls under the plastic surgery department.
According to hospital sources, only 50 percent of required facilities are available at the Mayo hospital; there is no operation theatre, ICU or high dependency unit to cater for burn patients. At least three operation theatres are needed to fulfill their requirements.
Presently the operation theatre at the Neurosurgery department is being used for procedures relating to burns. The hospital needs to cater to approximately 8500 patients every day and there should therefore be a full-fledged, proper burns centre in the hospital. Instead, only a 14-bed burns ward is currently available for at least 200 patients suffering from burns at its emergency and 300 patients who visit its Out Patient Department per month. Besides this, only two modes of treatment including Dermatome vac closure and Tangential excision are provided.
Patients who visit burns units have gas, electricity and fire burns while many also suffer from acid burns, especially the women. It is even more important for a burns center to be set up in the Children’s Hospital for children suffering from burn injuries. Currently, there is a great dearth of these facilities at hospitals in the Punjab.
The witer is a journalist based in Lahore.
