PESHAWAR: Faulty sterilization causing infections at Khyber Hospital
By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Nov 29: Lack of sterilization facilities at the operation theatre of the Khyber Teaching Hospital has been causing infections to patients, doctors and affected patients told Dawn.
Several patients who underwent surgeries in the past few months have had their wounds infected owing to poor sterilization at the hospital, said a surgeon.
According to him, sterilization played vital role in the success of every operation. But owing to negligence all the hard work done by surgeons and health workers go waste.
“I was operated upon by a senior surgeon for gall bladder stones. The room where the surgeon operated was fumigated a day earlier, but still my wound got infected, which haunted me for more than two months,” said a young man, Altaf Hussain, who stayed at VIP room of the hospital.
He said he was all right for the first two days after operation, but then he developed infection that caused him severe temperature and the surgeon had to open his wound again. In the process, he said, he spent thousands of rupees on buying antibiotics from the market.
A local journalist who was also operated for the same problem in the same operation theatre of the hospital some 20 days ago, is still on the bed, waiting for his infected wound to heal.
According to him, the doctor who operated upon him, was very competent as well as cooperative, but something went wrong in the operation theatre that resulted in the infection.
Another person, Amjad Ali from Parachinar, who was operated for appendex about 25 days back, is also still on the bed taking heavy doses of antibiotics to cure his temperature and infected wound.
A lady at the same hospital, underwent an appendix operation, complained that she had spent about Rs100,000 on buying antibiotics to get her infected wound cured.
She said from the prevalent unhygienic conditions at the operation theatre, she was reluctant to get herself operated upon, but the surgeon was her relative due to which she agreed for the operation at the KTH.
A surgeon put the blame on Central Sterilization Department which supplies the instruments to the operation theatre after sterilizing them.
“We just use the instruments given to us by the operation theatre assistants. There is no mechanism to determine whether these instruments are properly sterilized or not,” he said.
According to him, he had complained to the chief executive of the hospital, Prof Dr Changez Hakim Khan, who himself is a senior surgeon to look into the matter.
An operation theatre assistant said that they did not have enough instruments required for the number of patients put on the operation lists every day.
“Some time, we have three sterilized trays for gall bladder stones at the operation theatre, but had to facilitate the operations of four or more patients, which causes problems,” he said.
Likewise, a source at the Central Sterilization Department, revealed that the machines which were used for sterilization of the instruments, had become outdated.
“Many times, we employ conventional ways to sterilize instruments, owing to the nonavailability of the new machines needed for sterilization,” he said.
A surgeon said that they administered intravenous antibiotics to the patients before operating on them to minimize the chances of infections. He said supply of sterilized instruments was the job of other people not theirs.
According to him, the surgeons were responsible for doing faulty operations and not for infections. He said that there were a few cases of infections, which could be stopped through provision of sterilized instruments to the surgeons.
Chief Executive of the KTH Dr Changez Hakim Khan told Dawn that it was in his notice and had initiated measures to cope with the situation.
Dr Khan said that he had taken over as head of the hospital recently and had planned crash programmes for operation theatre, casualty and private rooms to stem the tide of infections.
