PESHAWAR, Oct 22: The lack of health care facilities at the primary -and secondary-level hospitals have compelled the patients in those areas to visit the tertiary hospitals in the city, doctors told Dawn on Tuesday.

“Even the patients who could easily be treated at the basic health units (BHUs) or DHQs come to the teaching hospitals where they become an unnecessary burden for the doctors

who should be attending to chronically-ill patients,” said a doctor at Khyber Teaching Hospital.”

He said that the patients should contact the nearest health facilities in their own regions for treatment and should be referred to the DHQs if the treatment facilities weren’t available at the rural health centres (RHCs) or the BHUs.

This, he said, would lessen the number of patients visiting the three teaching hospitals — Lady Reading Hospital (LRH), Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC), and KTH.

For instance, the 1200-bedded KTH has 30 wards, each consisting 38 sanctioned beds. The doctors have to admit 80 patients on every emergency day, most of whom end up on wooden benches.

The medical and surgical units of the hospitals remain full to capacity all the time leaving hardly any space for the nursing staff to move about.

“A patient with appendicitis was brought from Buner district, 170 kilometres from here. We operated upon him, because we cannot refuse patients needing emergency treatment. But we fail to understand why he chose to come here when there were similar facilities available in his home district,” said a surgeon at the LRH.

According to a relative of the patient, the hospital in their area was ill-equipped and under-staffed.

Recently, Governor Iftikhar Hussain Shah has said that Rs1 billion was being spent to develop primary and secondary health facilities with a view to reduce the load of patients on the tertiary care hospitals.

Surprisingly, every DHQ hospital has had the services of specialists including medicine, surgery, ENT and eye etc., but the people still preferred to visit doctors at the city hospitals. It is being said that people have lost confidence in the BHUs, RHCs and DHQs.

A surgeon at the KTH informed that the peoples’ fears regarding regional health care facilities weren’t totally misplaced, because there were numerous instances when the patients died of simple and curable diseases at the RHCs and DHQs.

A patient who was admitted to DHQ, Mardan, for severe abdominal pain, was given pain killers. His condition deteriorated immensely and his relatives brought the him to the KTH, and was diagnosed as perforated appendicitis. He died the same day.

This was one patient who could have been saved had he been treated for appendicictomy, the surgeon said.