PESHAWAR, Jan 3: Lack of sterilization facilities in the operation theatres of public sector hospitals has been causing infections to patients, doctors and stricken patients told Dawn.
Scores of patients who underwent surgeries in the past few months have had their wounds infected because of poor sterilization at the hospitals, said a surgeon. He added that some patients, who had come for minor operations, got infections, which made them bed-ridden for months.
The surgeon said that sterilization played a vital role in the success of any surgical procedure. But owing to negligence on this count, all the hard work by surgeons and health workers went waste.
"A senior surgeon operated me for gallbladder stones. I was alright in the first five days but developed temperature on the sixth. My wound was found infected upon examination. This caused me immense trouble for more than three months," said Mohammad Bashir, who stayed at the surgical ward of a teaching hospital for a month.
"Such patients are discharged from hospital after four days but faulty sterilization detains them there for much longer," said the surgeon who had performed Bashir's operation.
Another patient said he was operated upon for kidney stones and was fine in the first two days after the operation. But then he developed infection resulting in the reopening of his wound. In the process, he said he had to spend thousands on purchase of antibiotics.
The younger brother of a medical officer, who was also operated upon for the same problem in the same operation theatre three months ago, is still in bed, waiting for his infected wound to heal.
According to him, the doctor who carried out the surgical procedure was both competent and cooperative, but something went wrong in the operation theatre which resulted in the infection.
Mohammad Raees, a patient from Mardan, was operated upon for appendix about 25 days back. He is bedridden because his wound caught infection after the operation and is being administered a cocktail of high-potency drugs to cure his temperature and infected wound.
A woman at another teaching hospital, who underwent a similar operation, complained that she had spent about Rs100,000 on buying antibiotics to get her infected wound cured.
In view of the prevalent unhygienic conditions in the operation theatre, she was reluctant to get her operation there, but the surgeon was her relative who persuaded her to undergo it.
A surgeon put the blame on central sterilization departments which are responsible for sterilizing instruments used in operations. "We just use the instruments provided by operation theatre assistants. There is no mechanism to determine whether they are properly sterilized," he said.
According to him, he had urged the chief executive of the hospital to look into the matter. He said many patients preferred to undergo operations in private hospitals because of increasing number of instances in which patients caught post-operation infection in the state-run hospitals.
An operation theatre assistant said: "We do not have enough instruments to handle the number of cases put on the operation lists every day."
