KARACHI, Nov 11: The Burns Centre at the Civil Hospital Karachi, the only public sector facility of its kind in Sindh offering teaching and training services, along with treatment to burns patients, will become operational by the next month (December).

The frequent rise in the number of burns cases in the city, where on average 1,000 such incidents are reported annually at the CHK's Burns Unit, other than those who visit OPDs, compelled the concerned citizens to constitute a group, "Friends of Burns Centre (FBC)", who, along with some medical professionals, made efforts to provide the city with a full-fledged burns centre, at the CHK.

The state-of-art facility, completed with a significant help from private donors, besides government funding, including Rs8 million given for procurement of equipment, will be run by a management board, for which a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed on Thursday by the representative of the Friends of Burns Centre and the government functionaries.

It will be a 10-member board, which will include Sindh Health secretary as its president, and chairperson of the FBC as vice-president, besides DUHS vice-chancellor as a member.

The need for a burns treatment centre in the public sector was felt as most burns patients, especially those from middle and lower income groups in want of surgical intervention are in no position to afford the expensive treatment at the private sector hospitals, while none of the government hospitals, with the exception of the National Institute of Child Health, treats complicated and serious burn cases. Under an arrangement all burns cases of paediatric category are attended at the NICH, and those of adult patients at the Plastic Surgery and Burns Unit of the CHK.

Along with accidental instances causing varied degrees of burns and constituting 98 per cent of such cases referred to the Plastic Surgery and Burns Unit of the CHK, followed by homicidal and suicidal nature of burns, there is almost an equal number of congenital as well as unintentional nature of deformities required to be corrected through plastic surgery.

Treatment of such cases, which also had to be attended in extremely hygienic conditions under highly sterilised circumstances, will now be possible at the new Burns Centre.

Head of the Plastic Surgery, Burns Unit and the new Burns Centre Prof Shaista Effendi, talking to APP mentioned that the facility was housed in a building notified as a protected heritage.

Previously, the very structure located within the premises of the CHK and Dow University of Health Sciences was about to be demolished and the new building was decided to be erected, however, the local philanthropists' group, Friends of Burns Centre, supported Surgeon Shaista Effendi and Conservationist Yasmin Lari in renovation of the building with its original structure intact.

To a query, Prof Effendi said there was also no dearth of qualified and well-trained healthcare providers, including doctors, nurses, paramedics, physiotherapists and technical staff to provide the required care to the patients at the new centre.

As for recurring expenditures of the centre, she said these were estimated to come to around Rs1 million, which, besides the government, would be met with the assistance of local philanthropists.-APP