KARACHI, May 10: The vice chancellor of the University of Karachi has offered to set up an anaesthesiology institute on the campus.

This offer was made by the KU vice chancellor, Dr Zafar Saied Saify, at the inaugural session of the annual conference organized by the Pakistan Society of Anaesthesiologists here on Saturday.

He said: “It is a matter of great satisfaction that in the field of surgery tremendous and dynamic advancement has been made by medical scientists. Modern technology has simplified innumerable complexities related to surgery and anaesthesia. Using modern techniques and discoveries in the horizon of the medicines, surgery patients are given well-estimated and measured dosage of anaesthetic drugs that not only save patients from unbearable pain but also protects them from the side effects of the drugs highly reducing the rate of suffering on this account.”

The keynote address was delivered by Dr Habib-ul-Haq Siddiqui, patron of the Pakistan Society of Anaesthesiologists. He said: “There will be hardly a few persons in the audience who can recall that after independence there were only three or four qualified anaesthetists for the whole country which included Bangladesh at that time. All that we could hope for were spinals or open drop ether chloroform technologies. Most of the work was done by ward boys, untrained house surgeons or surgeons themselves. For very wide areas of the country there were no anaesthetists, no equipment, hardly any drugs, no respect and no money in this profession.”

He added that after about a decade things began to change. “New entrants with better training and higher qualifications came back to the country. They were few but they made their presence felt. They had a very hard time. in March 1971 the Pakistan Society of Anaesthesiologists was born. We started a collective life. We began to set goals. We worked very hard with singleness of purpose.”

He said: “A new entrant to anaesthesia or surgery has a tendency to believe that the practice of anaesthesia has always been the same way as he sees it today. He does not know that by doing so he is ignoring the achievements of those who discovered all that is known and whose achievements and sacrifices brought anaesthesia to the present attractive position. We have all received a magnificent endowment from our predecessors that we use to bring comfort to our patients every day.”

He said anaesthesiologists had started accepting the responsibility of providing a motionless surgical field and had begun to look after the management of patients’ overall functions vide painless deliveries by epidurals.”