LAHORE, Oct 5: A two-year-old boy and a man received burn injures and equipments worth over Rs30 million were damaged when a fire broke out in the three operation theatres of Services Hospital on Tuesday morning, rescue and hospital sources said.

The state-of-the-art operation theatres were established by the father-in-law of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif eight years ago. These operation theatres are named after Bano Meraj, the mother-in-law of the chief minister.

A source said the ill-equipped hospital tried to douse the fire with water but failed. The hospital suffered a Rs30 million loss in the fire, a Rescue 1122 spokesman quoted a hospital official as having said. He said Dr Rehan informed them about the fire at 9:35am and firefighters took one hour to douse it, he said.

The blaze erupted at the second floor of the hospital at 9am and engulfed the three operation theatres there at a time when the surgery of minor Aneel was being performed in one of the rooms, the source said. The boy was also burnt due to delay in rescue work. All equipment such as a cautery machine, two ventilators, monitors, an anesthesia machine, operation tables, a scrub station, operation lights and image intensifiers were damaged, the source said. Authorities are trying to establish the cause of the fire.

Operation theatres might be closed for an ‘indefinite’ period because of fund paucity as the Punjab health department has banned maintenance and repair of equipment and construction works. Orthopedic surgeon M Hashmi told Dawn he was about to start surgery of the boy when the fire broke out in the attached storeroom and the plumes of smoke choked Bano Meraj theatres. “I immediately evacuated the boy who was under general anesthesia,” he said adding that the fire engulfed all three theaters in no time.

Services Hospital Medical Superintendent (MS) Dr Muhammad Javed and other senior management officials were in a meeting at that time and reacted to the incident late as there was no senior doctor to supervise the rescue work, the source said.

Rescue 1122 officials arrived at the hospital and doused the fire after an hour. Up to 20 patients are operated upon every day in these theatres.

The surgeries to be conducted on Tuesday have been postponed for some days. Dr Muhammad Javed said an inquiry committee, consisting of surgery department head Prof Dr Sarfraz Ahmad, urology department head Prof Riaz Tasleem, pediatrician department head Prof Muhammad Ali Khan and DMS Dr Muhammad Saeed, would probe into the fire incident.

All inquiry committee members are doctors and have no experience to probe matters relating to fire incidents. Nobody from biomedical engineers, electrical inspectors or fire extinguishing staff was made the part of the inquiry committee. The committee has yet to start its probe.

Fire and terror incidents in public health institutions have become a routine. Earlier, a fire incident had also been reported in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the Jinnah Hospital three weeks ago. Besides the fire incident, the hospital grabbed headlines because of a terror attack on Jinnah Hospital in May, and vandalizing of its emergency ward by armed men last week.