Wait for critical dept at govt hospitals continues

VISAKHAPATNAM, 24 June 2019: The biggest tertiary care teaching hospital in north-coastal AP, Andhra Medical College (AMC) and King George Hospital (KGH) lack a government-sanctioned exclusive emergency medicine department (EMD) plus critical care department, as well as a transfusion medicine department.
Even though 250-350 emergency patients (both in-patients and out-patients) are brought in every day at the in-house EMD at AMC-KGH, there are no government sanctioned posts and except at Guntur Medical College, other state-run hospitals lack this crucial department.

EMD deals with emergency medical care and stabilising the patient—who can be a victim of accident, burns, stroke, heart attack or poisoning before receiving further specialised treatment. On the other hand, critical care deals with intensive care units (ICUs), patients on ventilators, anaesthesia and so on.

This facility is still not available at the Visakha Institute of Medical Sciences (VIMS), though the hospital located by the national highway is intended to focus on EMD and critical care for accident victims.

Dr K Satyavaraprasad, director of VIMS said, “We are trying to talk to the government to set up a full-fledged 30-bed EMD soon as per MCI guidelines. It would be the most important department of VIMS.”

Speaking to TOI about AMC-KGH, principal of AMC, Dr P V Sudhakar said, “Though the proposal to set up EMD and transfusion medicine departments was sent to the director of medical education (DME), but posts have not been sanctioned yet. Unless a Government Order (GO) is passed, full-fledged department with postgraduate training and faculty cannot commence. But since we have to cater to hundreds of emergency and critical cases, we have created our own EMD department internally with 30 beds and we are posting doctors (assistant professors) by rotation every month.”

“The transfusion medicine department also gets 50-60 patients per day and a separate department is required for research on blood components, catering to thalassemia and haemophilia and not just blood donation and transfusion,” added Dr Sudhakar. TOI