KARACHI, Oct 12 Government hospitals have no uniform policy regarding provision of mega-platelets units to the severely-ill dengue patients, it emerged on Tuesday.

A survey conducted by Dawn gave to understand that some of the government hospitals considered it wiser to send their in-house dengue positive patients seeking blood transfusion to the teaching hospitals instead of handling them further.

It is learnt that other hospitals initially ask the relatives or attendants of such patients to arrange the units in question on their own from the private sector, and in case if they could not afford the costly units then the hospitals would procure the platelets bags from private blood banks.

Physicians believed that a patient having his or her platelets count less than 25,000 has chances to bleed profusely and thus needs an immediate transfusion to improve the platelets count. However, any further decrease in the platelets count down to 10,000 to 12,000 could make the management of a dengue positive patient extremely difficult.

According to the daily report on dengue fever and dengue haemorrhagic fever, with the admission of 82 new cases during the last 24 hours, 1,960 dengue-suspected patients had been admitted to or seen in the OPDs of the hospitals since January this year. Of them, 978 had been tested positive for dengue fever in the city and five of them expired within a span of last six weeks.

The government and private hospitals had to arrange 53 mega-platelet units and transfuse to patients severely affected by dengue fever during past two weeks or so, it added.

According to the dengue surveillance cell, 29 of the mega-platelet units were given to patients at the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, 11 at the Civil Hospital Karachi (CHK), six at the Sindh Government Qatar Hospital in Orangi Town, four at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, two at the Holy Family Hospital and one at the Liaquat National Hospital.

A spokesman for the provincial health department said that Health Minister Dr Sagheer Ahmad had asked the medical superintendents of the government hospitals not to show any negligence in the case of dengue-suspected or confirmed patients. The dengue kits and mega-platelets-unit bags were available with all the government hospitals and being provided to the patients as per their needs, the spokesman added.

The medical superintendent of the CHK, Dr Saeed Qureshi, told Dawn that a cell separator provided by the Sindh health department last year, was in operation, in addition to one such machine already available with the patients' welfare association, an NGO meeting different needs of the CHK patients.

Since the NGO had to arrange the costly empty mega-platelet unit bags for the collection of platelets from its resources, it had been decided that the CHK would not supply any mega-platelets unit to patients other than its in-house ones, he said, adding that however, any requirement of mega-platelets unit for patient from outside could be fulfilled only once the hospitals referred the patient to the CHK and he was admitted to the hospital.

Dr Saif Ahmad, the medical Superintendent of the Sindh Government Qatar Hospital — the first recipient of a cell separator in the government sector — said that the hospital had started preparing mega-platelet units on its own this year.

He said that so far it had a policy to provide the blood cells in question not only to the in-house patients, but also to those admitted at other government hospitals in the city. “Since we have a stock of empty mega-platelet-unit bags, which were provided to us last year by the health department, we are ready to offer the platelets to needy patient provided they bring blood donors for the purpose.”

The medical superintendent of the Sindh Government Hospital, Korangi, Dr Abdul Wahid Rajput, said that his hospital too had started receiving dengue patients and it had been planned that if a patient detected with dengue fever and fell severely ill then he or she would certainly be referred to the CHK for further treatment, including the transfusion of mega-platelet units.

However, the medical superintendent of the Sindh Government Hospital, Liaquatabad, Dr Tabassum Laeeq, said that the management had decided to bear the cost of the platelets for those who could not afford the costly process from the hospital's kitty.

She claimed that instead of sending the patients to other health facilities, the hospital initially asked the patients to arrange the mega-platelet units on their own, but if a patient was unable to bear the cost, which was estimated roughly between Rs14,000 and Rs 16,000 per bag, then the hospital would arrange funds for the platelets transfusion.

When contacted, the medical superintendent of the Sindh Government Hospital, New Karachi, Dr Hasan Alam, said that the hospital had been instructed by the high-ups to admit the dengue-suspected patient for observation and diagnostic purposes. “If a patient is detected dengue positive and an immediate transfusion of mega-platelet units is found necessary then he would immediately be shifted to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, which has recently allocated a special wing for the treatment of dengue patients.”