After surgery patients sent back into the mountain cold, say doctors in Kashmir
Mansehra (AsiaNews) The survivors from the October 8 earthquake increasingly need medical help, but weather conditions and limited means at the disposal of volunteers make relief operations more and more desperate.
In Mansehra Hospital's Surgery ward there were a thousand patients on the day of the quake; the following day, they were two thousand. "But the number is growing," said one doctor working in the hospital, "and we don't have the means to perform at our best".
"The conditions of the operating theatre and surgery are the most primitive we have ever worked in," said Bastiaan Gerrits, an anaesthetist who has come from the Netherlands as a volunteer, "but these technical problems are minor when compared to the need to treat the patients."
Mansehra Hospital has turned into the medical relief operations headquarters for the district, and is now referred to as the District Headquarters or DHQ.
Its surgery ward is makeshift and was originally intended as the labour wardsince the October 8 quake it has handled the most urgent surgery.
The resident orthopaedic surgeon, Dr. Shoaib, was appointed two months before the earthquake. He got his first day off after a month when four volunteer surgeons arrived from the Netherlands last week sent by Caritas Netherlands
"We have performed 40 surgeries in the first three days here at the DHQ," said plastic surgeon Gabriel Jansen.
"The surgeries of the past three days ranged from head and ankle injuries to broken legs and pelvic bones, and eight patients who required skin grafts," Dr Gerrits said.
"The youngest was a six-month old baby girl who needed open skull surgery," he said. "The wound had been unattended for three weeks before the baby was brought to us," he noted. "Only a dirty bandage was wrapped around the baby's head to cover the wound. Now the child is with its mother in one of the tents outside." However, at times the temperature drops to around zero degrees centigrade and the tents have no form of heating."
"We are so limited in what we can do," Dr Gerrits said. "Our concerns relate to the absence of a recovery room to monitor the patients. The hospital has absolutely no capacity for pre- or post-surgery monitoring."
The tent-wards on the hospital premises accommodate some 500 people but the problems the medical staff faces are huge.
"The least we can do is to ensure that the patient is warm when recovering from anaesthesia, but then we have to send the patient outside into a cold tent. These conditions are not conducive to a patient's healing after such a major surgery." But there are few alternatives.
The first thing needed in the post-surgery phase is for patients to rest in places that, if they cannot be fully aseptic, must not be too dirty. Infections are everywhere and surgery patients are very vulnerable to attacks by germs.
Unfortunately, international aid is not forthcoming and the means at the doctors' disposal is such that the number of victims is bound to rise.
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09/11/2005
