With two other patients on the same bed, Gyanu´s mother cannot change her position as there is bare enough space to lie down. [break]To make the matter worse, increasing number of patients and the crowd accompanying them has made it difficult to even feed her mother.
Doctors diagnosed her mother with typhoid and asked Gyanu to admit her at the hospital for treatment. Gyanu brought her mother to the hospital on Thursday evening but until Friday night she was not able to find a separate bed for her.
Gyanu hasn´t complained about the inconvenience to the hospital administration, as she has herself seen the emergency ward swarming with new patients every day. Each bed in the emergency ward has at least two patients while some beds accommodate as many as four patients.
The hospital staff said that the hospital does not have enough beds to keep up with the inflow of patients. “Patients from across the country are brought to TUTH in the hopes of getting better treatment,” said Director of Hospital Dr Keshav Prasad Singh. “But we cannot accommodate all of them as we have limited number of beds.” According to Singh, the hospital has only a total of 500 beds. “We ask the patients to go to other hospitals but they insist on getting treated here,” Singh said. “They say they cannot afford private hospitals.”
Even the patients who need to be admitted to Coronary Care Unit (CCU) or Intensive Care Unit (ICU) have to be kept at emergency ward as both the units have very few beds.
The emergency ward of the hospital has a total of 80 beds, a considerable increment from 10 beds until recently. The room and facilities for additional beds were arranged with the support of businessman Min Bahadur Gurung.
But problems remain as it is.
The hospital said the only solution to the problem is additional beds. The hospital completed the construction of three new blocks a year ago, that can house three hundred beds. But the blocks cannot come into operation as they are yet to be fitted with other necessary infrastructure.
“We have asked the government to provide us with necessary funds but to no avail,” Dr Singh said.
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