No doctor remains available, workload on paramedic staff only, allege attendants
Gul Owais
Srinagar, Nov 8: Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the patients who are admitted in the emergency ward at Chest Disease hospital—designated COVID care facility—here are being pushed to the wall in absence of proper care as well as the lack of basic facilities, attendants alleged on Sunday.
Attendants accompanying the patients here at CD hospital told Precious Kashmir that the hospital administration has failed to keep doctors available round the clock in the emergency ward, saying that the patients are being taken care by the paramedics only.
An attendant said that most of the paramedical staff was not capable of looking after the patients admitted in the emergency ward. “There was a dire need to ensure the availability of at least one doctor at an emergency ward round the clock to ensure the patient who is suffering from serious ailment is not forced to face hardships,” he said.
He added that although some of the paramedic staff are very much capable of performing their duties at the emergency ward, some staff members are not even able to inject a needle at the apt place. “Yesterday, a patient was injected almost seven times when he had to get the blood point. This shows the negligence as well as the incapability of the staff,” he alleged.
The attendant further said that the attendants had to face tremendous hardships whenever their patient’s health gets deteriorated. “We have to move from one room to another in search of the paramedical staff to ask them to check our patient. They too don’t stay in their rooms but usually move from one room to the other,” he added.
He stated that not only the absence of doctors, but the emergency at CD hospital even lacks the basic facilities. “We are being told to conduct a test from outside the hospital and that too at a designated lab. The doctors here are not entertaining the test conducted at other labs except the one advised by them,” he said.
Meanwhile, Head of Department CD hospital Dr Naveed Nazir Shah didn’t receive the repeated phone calls from this reporter to respond to the queries.
