Bashir Assad
SRINAGAR, Sept 19: While damages in summer capital owing to unprecedented floods are unfathomable, the healthcare infrastructure has been totally ruined. sources peg the damage caused at Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital (SMHS) and Medical College alone at Rs 200 crore approximately.
This government-owned general hospital and medical college at Karan Nagar is still under three feet of water. Water level had risen to about ten feet here. As a result, heavy medical equipment, which is usually installed on the ground floor, was severely impacted.
Though the Jhelum Valley Medical College, Bemina, suffered the maximum with damage caused to the main building too, SMHS Karan Nagar suffered huge losses in terms of its medical investigation machines. According to senior officials of SMHS, high-cost equipment including four CT scan machines, three MRI machines and eight X-ray plants have been damaged here.
Sources say that the ENT Department of the hospital, considered to be among the best in north India, has also been damaged extensively. Equipment at the hospital laboratories and the blood bank have been rendered unusable by the flood. Sources say that the Opthalmology Department of the hospital, which had been upgraded recently, has also been ravaged by the flood waters.
The situation is similar in the SMHS Medical College, where the flood has damaged the departments of pathology, bio-chemistry, micro-biology and forensic medicine. Since the administrative block of the medical college had also been flooded, official records have been damaged.
The Medical Superintendent of Bone and Joints Hospital, Barzulla,Dr Shabir Ahmad, said that the X-ray plant of the emergency block of the hospital has been completely damaged by the flood. Dr Ahmad said it will take weeks together to clear the muck left in the hospital after the flood waters receded. Yesterday, the hospital management was able to make the OPD block here functional.
The patients admitted at the hospital had been shifted on an urgent basis to Kashmir Nursing Home on Gupkar Road. The GB Pant Children and Maternity Hospital and Lal Ded Hospital are flooded.
Sources in the Health and Medical Education Department said that though the public infrastructure across the state has been impacted severely, health care services will have to be rebuilt on priority basis. |
