Dulal, 69, currently admitted into the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the adjoining Manmohan Cardiothoracic Vascular and Transplant Center (MCTVC), is in a critical condition, and doctors on Monday advised another operation to treat the infected graft. But till late Monday evening he could not be operated due to lack of anesthesia machine at the emergency operation theater.[break]
Pushkar Joshi, 14, of Attariya, Kailali, was scheduled to get a surgery on his left ear done by Monday afternoon. His family that was informed about the operation only on Sunday somehow managed the required money with great difficulty. But his operation too was stalled due to lack of the anesthesia machine and he may now have to wait till December to get his ear operated.
Scores of patients have been facing such difficulties everyday as the TUTH has stopped emergency surgeries during the day since March 17 in lack of the machine that costs over one million rupees. The machine at the emergency operation theater has been out of order for the past one month. The notice board outside the operation theater, which had Dulal´s name in the list of patients scheduled for emergency surgeries on Monday, also had a notice in larger fonts: ´No Anesthesia Machine´.
The hospital now conducts only elective surgeries, those that have been planned long time ago, during the day but emergency surgeries, slated for evenings when the anesthesia machines of other operation theaters are not in use, have been piling up.
Hospital Director Dr KP Singh conceded that only emergency surgeries that called for an immediate attention to save the life of a patient are conducted during the day instead of the pre-scheduled ´elective´ operations.
But critical cases like that of Dulal, apparently, don´t fall in the genuine emergency category and they are being made to wait till evening to get operated. “He is in a very critical state at the ICU but he is not being operated,” complained Dulal´s son Hari Sharan.
Even if they are operated during the day ahead of the scheduled surgeries, the patients enlisted for the elective surgeries have to face a predicament like that suffered by Joshi.
“We borrowed the money with great difficulty and he has been lying on the bed inside the operation theater since morning. Now they have asked us to come on Sunday to get the next date which might fall in December,” rued Joshi´s sister-in-law.
Heads of the surgery department Dr Pradeep Baidya and anesthesia department Dr Mod Nath Marahatta conceded that the increase in number of emergency operations for evening and night puts unnecessary stress on the surgeons to work longer shifts.
Hospital Director Dr Singh claimed that the machine will arrive from Germany in a couple of days and the services will resume pretty soon. “We couldn´t get the machine repaired in Nepal and it is not available in the country,” Dr Singh argued.
But senior doctors, preferring to be unnamed, contend that a big hospital like TUTH should always have contingency plans, like having a spare machine, to deal with situations like machine breakdown. “It puts the management on poor light. The management should get its act together,” summed up a senior doctor.
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