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ISLAMABAD: Ordinarily, a hospital would be thinking of expanding to take care of more sick, but the biggest hospital in the city is worrying about making room for more dead.
That is because the morgue in the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) has room for 10 bodies but is overwhelmed by the bodies brought to it from surrounding areas for safe keeping, a worker of the morgue explained.It was the latter that made the management of the hospital submit a Rs20 million plan to the government last year for expanding the morgue's capacity to 48 bodies. The plan grew from the horrifying experience of July 2010 when the bodies - rather their parts - of the 152 victims of the AirBlue crash had to be kept in a cold storage meant for vegetables as the Pims had absolutely no place for them.
“We had such a big disaster at our hands that we had to shut down our Out-Patients operations that day,” a Pims official recalled.
Even in normal days, the morgue serves more the dead brought from outside Islamabad than its own citizens. Relatives take away the body of anyone dying in the hospital the same day, or at the most the next day, if the body is to be sent to some other city for burial.
But such occasions have been increasing with the increase in the population.
“Look at the population of Islamabad. It's around 1.8 million. And then we have to cater to the needs of Azad Kashmir, Khyber Pkahtunkhwa and a number of cities of Punjab also,” said Pims' executive director, Prof Mehmood Jamal.
Terrorist attacks, bomb blasts and fatal accidents in these areas particularly create crisis situation for the Pims.
“Our morgue cannot handle disasters at all,” Prof Jamal said, referring to its proposed expansion.
His complaint was that it should not have been the worry of Pims in the first place. “Internationally, hospitals are not supposed to have morgues. It is the job of civic agencies to establish the facilities like morgues,” he said.
Pims' small facility would be enough for the bodies that arrive for autopsies. That requires the body to be kept in the chiller for a few days only.
“We want to follow the government rules which say anyone who dies at Pims and a body brought by police for autopsy must be kept in the morgue,” he said.
