PESHAWAR: The health department is working on a plan to share dengue cases out among all government hospitals of the provincial capital.

The relevant officials insist the plan will help ease the heavy dengue patient load of the Khyber Teaching Hospital, which is receiving 95 per cent of such cases from the city due to its close proximity to Tehkal area, where the mosquito-borne disease has been endemic for one and a half months.

They told Dawn that the health department had begun a consultative process on the introduction of a referral system for dengue cases among KTH, Lady Reading Hospital (LRH), Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC) and City Hospital, Peshawar, to share the patient load.

They said all those hospitals would allocate beds specifically for dengue patients to manage a large influx of dengue cases.

Officials say KTH will set aside 250 beds, LRH 100, HMC 60 to handle cases of mosquito-borne disease

According to the plan, the KTH will allocate 250 beds, LRH 100 and HMC 60 beds for the purpose and that these hospitals will be interconnected by a hotline.

Prior to referral, the hospitals where patients are to be referred will be properly informed about the cases and special beds will be reserved there.

Currently, the KTH is catering to a bulk of dengue cases. It received 1,003 of the total of 2,050 suspected patients on Saturday. That accounted for 230 of the total of 413 hospitalisations. The hospital admitted 54 of the total of 115 new patients.

According to the daily update by the Dengue Repose Unit, 18 people have so far died of the disease since early July.

The sources said 15 deaths had occurred in the KTH, with a 0.84 mortality rate, which was within permissible limits of the World Health Organisation.

The hospital faces a severe shortage of beds, which prompted the health department to devise a mechanism of patients to improve care.

The hospital has screened 23,000 suspected patients, found 4,500 to be dengue cases and admitted 1,705. Of them, 1,480 were discharged after recovery.

According to the plan, the health department will establish a system to send patients from KTH to LRH or HMC or City Hospital by ambulance so that the patients can get beds as well as proper care there.

The move is meant to provide standardised care to the people, who may suffer due to a lack of space at the KTH.

A full referral cycle will be developed in collaboration with the hospitals to refer patients to any of the four facilities with vacant beds.

The health department will transport patients from the districts upon physicians’ advice for which the Standard Operating Procedures are being developed to enforce the plan in the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, the LRH administration said it was ready to implement the dengue case referral plan and put an end to public health problem.

“We are ready to take patients from KTH or any other hospital in the province. Our hospital is meant to provide diagnostic and treatment facilities to the people,” LRH director Dr Khalid Masud told Dawn when asked about health department’s proposal.

He said the hospital had 34 infected dengue people as of today and had created space for 25 more to share the burden of patients with others.

The officials said dengue patients had flooded the KTH, which had performed well but other hospitals should share the heavy patient load for better care of the infected people.

They said the health department in collaboration with the district government had begun visiting the areas reporting such cases with a view to scale up public awareness of the causes of the mosquito-borne disease.

The officials said the Dengue Response Unit had been regularly receiving lists of dengue patients from the health facilities following which it sent teams to those areas.

On Saturday, the teams visited Gharibabad locality near Tehkal, the epicenter of the vector-borne disease, where they found larva in mud pots in most houses and informed them about precautionary measures against the disease.

In one house, which had reported three dengue cases, mud pots were found to be full of mosquito larva.

The people have affixed papers on their houses in the locality praying to the Almighty Allah to protect them against dengue.

Officials said the next two weeks were highly infective for dengue fever and therefore, the people should adopt measures to prevent mosquito bites.

Published in Dawn, September 10th, 2017