PESHAWAR: The medical teaching institutions in Peshawar are unwilling to start OPD and elective services in present situation and expose patients and staff to Covid-19 infection, according to sources.

“The province’s biggest health facility Lady Reading Hospital (LRH) receives 6,000 patients on average per day in normal circumstances and after resumption of OPDs, the people will get exposed to coronavirus,” said the physicians.

Similarly, about 3,000 patients visit each of Khyber Teaching Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Complex every day and allowing full services with no precautions, can endanger their health.

Last week, the health department ordered the district and tehsil headquarters hospitals to start OPDs and elective services including surgeries and other procedure subject to social distancing measures. However, the medical teaching institutions in the provincial capital want the government to make it binding upon the patients, who are coming from outside, to first visit the district headquarters hospitals in their native areas and come to Peshawar only when they are referred.

Physicians fear resumption of services will expose people to Covid-19

The administrator of one of the MTIs told Dawn that since the closure of general services, patients’ load at the accident and emergency departments doubled that adversely affected the care of the critically-ill and injured patients.

According to him, all the three MTIs have been home to scores of Covid-19 patients. Presently there are also some Covid-19 patients in these hospitals, therefore, other patients couldn’t be exposed to the infection by allowing full-fledged operations.

“In normal days, the OPDs at the MTIs remain full to the capacity which can be dangerous for the people,” he said. He added that one year ago, a study showed that only 16 per cent of the patients coming to LRH belonged to Peshawar district and the rest were from other districts where hospitals having specialist doctors existed.

LRH director Dr Khalid Masud told Dawn that they had drawn a plan to start general services on limited scale next week but the entry of the patients would be linked with adherence to standard operating procedure devised for Covid-19.

“There will be no entry without masks and one patient should be accompanied by one attendant. We want the patients to come to LRH only when they need tertiary care and have referral chit from the district headquarters hospitals. This will enable us to provide tertiary services to 500-600 patients per day and at the same time avoid getting infected with Covid-19,” he said.

Dr Khalid said that since closure of general services in March due to Covid-19, they started telemedicine services that showed that 74 per cent of the patients didn’t need to visit the tertiary care hospitals as they could easily be managed by local doctors. He added that a total of 6,000 patients, who approached telemedicine services, were prescribed medicines on telephone and the few, who needed tertiary care treatment, were asked to visit the hospital.

“Therefore, there is no need for all the patients to visit the MTIs as the pandemic is in progress. From June 1 to July 15, we received 67,500 patients in emergency and more than 75 per cent of them required general services that were available in every district,” said Dr Khalid.

He said that according to the plan, they would deploy 12 doctors in the old emergency building of the hospital where patients would be filtered and those, who required tertiary care treatment, would be sent to specialists.

Covid-19 has also badly affected the care of the newborn patients at the MTIs because of patients’ flow from other districts to Peshawar. “KTH receives most of the infants in its nursery ward because patients are referred to it from the district hospitals as well as the MTIs,” said doctors.

A paediatrician said that they used to admit two and three newborns on one cot, which was meant for a single patient.

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2020