LARKANA, June 8: The Chandka Medical College Hospital administration has let the 1,150-bed hospital’s only Intensive Care Unit (ICU) fall into disuse and officials of all levels are blaming each other for rendering this highly important unit idle.

The medical superintendent of the hospital, Dr. Mehboob Shah, admitted that only one patient, a close relative of a doctor, was admitted to the ICU six months ago and then it was closed again. The unit has been idle since 2006, sources said.

This correspondent recently visited the unit with Resident Medical Officer Dr Habibur Rehman Soomro and the medical engineer and found sensitive electronic machines and monitors worth millions of rupees covered in dust.

It looked more like a haunted place than an ICU of a hospital, which the government planned to upgrade to a medical university.

The medical engineer claimed that the machines were fully operational but preferred not to say anything when asked who was responsible for their maintenance. “We have deployed staff and it was our duty but to run it but to keep serious patients in it was the responsibility of concerned departments,” said the RMO.

The MS and RMO said that they did receive patients who should be kept in the ICU but they kept them in other wards with insufficient facilities. No doubt under incomplete facilities the death rate would naturally rise, they admitted.

“We are in dire need of ICU,” they said and blamed the department of surgery and anaesthesia for its failure. Only one staff nurse was posted the four-bed ICU with six-bed recovery rooms but she remains in Medical Unit-III and the doctors posted at the ICU had gradually got themselves transferred to other departments.

“When we were set to run this unit the doctors concerned pointed towards shortage of equipment, which we met. And arranged for the staff’s training in Karachi, he added.

The anaesthetists preferred to work at private medical centres and had little interest in hospital assignments, he alleged.

The ICU duties were assigned to postgraduate students and doctors but they did not live up to expectations and left the unit one after the other, the MS said. Anaesthetist was the backbone of the ICU and there was dearth of specialists in this field, he said.

Prof Surgeon Sikandar Shaikh, the college principal and chairman of CHCH management committee, said that the will of the administration coupled with availability of anaesthetist and functional ‘ventilators’ were key components for running the ICU.

He said that after a series of meetings with MS and concerned doctors a rostrum detailing duties of postgraduate students and other staff had been prepared.

But the hospital management could not sustain the pressure and the doctors were transferred one after the other, leaving the entire unit to fall into disuse.

The principal disputed the engineer’s claim and said that ‘ventilators’ were out of order. No matter the hospital received patients serious enough to be put in the ICU or not still it must be cleaned and kept ready for use instead of leaving it to be eaten away by rust, he said.

“We are ready to run the ICU provided the hospital managers show sincerity to run it,” he said. Many isolated cases could be quoted in which patients died due to non-functioning ICU, he said.

An anaesthetist said on condition of anonymity that equipment in the ICU was not fit to be used and it needed be replaced with updated equipment.