PESHAWAR, Sept 30: Lack of emergency service at the sole Khyber College of Dentistry has been causing hardships to patients needing emergency treatment, dental surgeons told Dawn on Monday.

“The Khyber College of Dentistry is providing treatment only to the patients who want scaling, extraction and root canal treatment of their teeth. There is no arrangement to provide first aid to the patients who need treatment for their broken teeth and jaws etc.,” said a dental surgeon at the KCD.

Even those patients who need routine treatment are given painfully late appointments at the hospital, according to the surgeon.

A patient told Dawn at the hospital that he had been brought to the KCD three days ago when he had met an accident near Jamrud Road but there had been no doctor to treat him. He said doctors at the ENT ward had bandaged up his bleeding jaws and treated his teeth.

“The doctor provided treatment to me for the sake of humanity, otherwise this wasn’t the responsibility of the ENT surgeon.”

The next morning, he was referred to the KCD, where he was asked by a senior doctor to contact him in his private clinic.

According to another ENT surgeon, it is not the first dentistry-related case to be treated at the ENT ward, nor would it be the last one and the patients needing dental treatment in emergency would continue to suffer, if an emergency ward is not launched in the KCD to cope with the seriously ill patients.

The doctor says they receive patients with broken and bleeding jaws and teeth but cannot do anything except administering pain killers and putting gauze cloth on their wounds to relieve their pain and stop bleeding. This is the job of orthodontists to treat the patients in emergency, he adds.

There is no department to deal with emergency cases, neither in the morning nor in the evening and night shifts. In fact, a makeshift emergency ward was set up at the KCD in early 90s when former NWFP governor Amir Gulistan Janjua had developed toothache for which he needed treatment every now and then.

The common people were also extended the facilities at the ward but it stopped functioning as soon as Mr Janjua quit the mighty slot of governorship.

Another surgeon said the KCD was the only premier institution in the province to provide dental education and dental care to the people and non-existence of an emergency department had been causing great hardships to patients.

He stressed the need for establishing emergency wards at the KCD, the Lady Reading Hospital, the KTH and the Hayatabad Medical Complex to treat patients needing cure for their ailing teeth.