KARACHI, June 18: The dental department of the local civil hospital is short of instruments required to extract teeth and also to undertake the root canal procedure.
As a result, its doctors are unable to sterilize each set of instruments after every procedure. What they do instead is sterilize all the sets once in the morning. After that it is a free-for-all.
Thus, only the first patients often get the ‘luxury’ and the benefits of sterilized instruments and implements. This practice could be instrumental in spreading the diseases like Hepatitis B and C and even HIV.
Also, at a time when 20-odd developmental projects have been undertaken at the hospital’s other departments, the dental department presents an unpleasant picture.
The department is situated on one of the sewage mains, leaks from which often block the passages leading up to it.
According to its doctors, the department should at least have 12 sets of instruments needed for each procedure. There are six dental units, or dentists’ chairs, in the department.
Dr Shams Soomro, Dr Noorjehan and Dr Shaista Shoaib told Dawn that more than 60 teeth were extracted every day in the department. “You can well imagine the frequency with which every set of instrument is used every day,” said one of them.
“In the present circumstances, we need more instruments. We want to sterilize one set after a procedure. However, this is not being done simply because there is a shortage of instruments.”
Defending the department’s performance, its head — Dr Shams Soomro — said all its doctors were cooperative and competent. He said his doctors sometimes had to pay from their own pockets for the disposable syringe cartridges, indirectly acknowledging that the administration was indifferent towards their problems.
He was of the view that the hospital administration should allow the department to charge Rs5 from each patient. “Rs5 is not much for a patient but it can be a Godsend for us.”
Dr Soomro added that the department did not want to handle the money to be raised from the Rs5 fee. “We don’t even want to touch this money. Let the administration handle it. But they should use this money only for the betterment of our department.”
He said dental care was expensive. “That’s why I am suggesting that we should charge a nominal fee from the patients.”
The doctors said bodies like the Infectious Diseases Society, besides dental associations and NGOs, should come forward to help them improve the situation obtaining in their department. Dr Soomro added that his department was a neglected one.
“Not so,” claimed the hospital’s superintendent, Prof Noshad A. Shaikh. “I visit the dental department at least three or four times every week.”
The medical superintendent said that soon work would start on the construction of a new sewage system.
The hospital’s MS claimed that some of the dental units in the department were repaired recently. He told Dawn an attendance-checking system had been introduced which had annoyed certain doctors.
