Dera hospital ran illegal skin bank, conducted surgeries
CHANDIGARH, NOV 2017:
The Shah Satnam Specialty Hospital inside Dera Sacha Sauda’s Sirsa headquarters was conducting skin transplant surgeries without any of the necessary approvals. In fact, when a team led by high court appointed court commissioner, A K Singh Panwar, searched the hospital recently, they recovered a domestic refrigerator with 29 plastic containers with skin pieces of varying lengths and breadths.
According to documents attached with Panwar’s report, a team of three doctors headed by civil surgeon of Sirsa, Dr Govind Gupta, visited the hospital on September 9 at around 10.30 am and inspected the skin bank. Dr Puneet Maheshwari, an anesthetist and representative of the hospital and Balbir Singh, an operation theater technician who went with the team, could not furnish any documents or licence for running the bank.
The skin pieces were stored in preservatives. When the team asked for all details, it was found that 40 skin grafts had taken place at the hospital.
“On inspection, it was found that out of 40 grafts, eight skin grafts have been discarded due to various diseases as stated by the doctors,” the report prepared by the inspection team says. “Three skin grafts have been used for the treatment of two patients at Shah Satnam hospital and at Balaji Hospital, Karnal.”
Hospital record taken into custody
Record regarding these two patients has been taken into custody. No consent regarding skin allograft was found in the record or files. Only high risk consent regarding surgery was found which was signed by patients and their kin.”
The voluminous report submitted to the Punjab and Haryana high court says that the hospital administration does not possess any registration document of human organs and has violated the norms of The Transplantation of Human organs Act 1994.
In his final report, the civil surgeon has said, “The hospitals engaged in removal, storage or transplantation of human organs are to be registered and if they violate any of the condition the registration may be cancelled.” He had recommended further investigation into the case.