107 kids dead at hospital where pigs roam, gadgets don’t work
Syed Intishab Ali & Rajiv Saxena TNN
Kota 5.01.2020
: It struck Shubham Hada almost immediately that the ICU to which he had brought his infant of two days with a respiratory disorder had no window panes. The temperature would plummet to about 3 degrees Celsius at night and bring with it gusts of wind that cut through a flimsy blanket to gnaw at the bone. His baby may just have shivered to death at Kota’s JK Lon Hospital, one among the 107 children to have perished till now since the start of December 2019. The new year brought no cheer. Seven kids died within the first four days of January.
“My child was exposed to biting chill,” Hada said as he mourned with family at his Vigyan Nagar house on Saturday. A state government report has now confirmed that many of the infants died from hypothermia, an emergency condition where the body temperature falls below 95°F. The normal is 98.6°F.
On the night of January 3, it was Mohammad Vakil’s heart that turned cold. Waiting on his baby, he watched another slip on the hospital bed nearby. “The attendant realised that the oxygen cylinder was empty. He immediately alerted the nursing staff, but it was too late. The infant couldn’t survive.”
The country has now suddenly woken up to the horrors of the Rajasthan hospital, but thousands of parents have seen their children die because even basic amenities and gadgets weren’t provided to doctors and nursing staff. Alarm bells rang in 2018, too, when a social audit of the hospital revealed that 22 out of 28 nebulisers were not working. Of 111 infusion pumps, used to administer medicines to infants, 81were non-functional. Only 6 of 20 life-support machines could be used. In short, the bulk of equipment was worthless.
In 2019, 963 infants had died in the hospital out of 16,915 admissions. In 2018, it was 1,005 from 16,436. On average, the figure has been 1,100 each year since 2014.
Doctors and nurses — angry, helpless and often at the receiving end of attendants’ ire and frustration — take pains to explain their struggle to bring down the mortality rate. But not only are they severely understaffed, they have appalling gadgets, much of it in disuse, to go to in times of an emergency. The infrastructure is crippling. It’s routine to tie up three babies to a bed, windows are gaping holes without glass, ventilators are dead and pigs roam around merrily. Sometimes patients are in danger of being bitten by rodents. Hygiene is as bad as it can get.
“They have now closed the holes the rats made to enter the NICU,” said Manish Kumar of Sultanpur in UP, whose baby is admitted here. He said it with great relief and obligation.
Padma, 25, lost her sixmonth-old son Tejas on December 23. She said she was setting aside her grief to take on the hospital for its negligence so that “no other mother should have to face” what she did. She has gone to the government demanding that she be compensated for the money she had to borrow for her baby’s treatment.
Enraged at the staff, she told TOI that their behaviour with attendants was “merciless and rude”. She recounted how guards at the NICU ward would often remark that no child would come out alive. “I had already spent close to ₹80,000 in private hospitals before I took Tejas to JK Lon on December 22. Suffering from pneumonia, he died the next day,” she said.
Full report on www.toi.in
KOTA HORROR: In 2019, 963 infants had died in the hospital out of 16,915 admissions. In 2018, it was 1,005 from 16,436. On average, the figure has been 1,100 each year since 2014
Syed Intishab Ali & Rajiv Saxena TNN
Kota 5.01.2020
: It struck Shubham Hada almost immediately that the ICU to which he had brought his infant of two days with a respiratory disorder had no window panes. The temperature would plummet to about 3 degrees Celsius at night and bring with it gusts of wind that cut through a flimsy blanket to gnaw at the bone. His baby may just have shivered to death at Kota’s JK Lon Hospital, one among the 107 children to have perished till now since the start of December 2019. The new year brought no cheer. Seven kids died within the first four days of January.
“My child was exposed to biting chill,” Hada said as he mourned with family at his Vigyan Nagar house on Saturday. A state government report has now confirmed that many of the infants died from hypothermia, an emergency condition where the body temperature falls below 95°F. The normal is 98.6°F.
On the night of January 3, it was Mohammad Vakil’s heart that turned cold. Waiting on his baby, he watched another slip on the hospital bed nearby. “The attendant realised that the oxygen cylinder was empty. He immediately alerted the nursing staff, but it was too late. The infant couldn’t survive.”
The country has now suddenly woken up to the horrors of the Rajasthan hospital, but thousands of parents have seen their children die because even basic amenities and gadgets weren’t provided to doctors and nursing staff. Alarm bells rang in 2018, too, when a social audit of the hospital revealed that 22 out of 28 nebulisers were not working. Of 111 infusion pumps, used to administer medicines to infants, 81were non-functional. Only 6 of 20 life-support machines could be used. In short, the bulk of equipment was worthless.
In 2019, 963 infants had died in the hospital out of 16,915 admissions. In 2018, it was 1,005 from 16,436. On average, the figure has been 1,100 each year since 2014.
Doctors and nurses — angry, helpless and often at the receiving end of attendants’ ire and frustration — take pains to explain their struggle to bring down the mortality rate. But not only are they severely understaffed, they have appalling gadgets, much of it in disuse, to go to in times of an emergency. The infrastructure is crippling. It’s routine to tie up three babies to a bed, windows are gaping holes without glass, ventilators are dead and pigs roam around merrily. Sometimes patients are in danger of being bitten by rodents. Hygiene is as bad as it can get.
“They have now closed the holes the rats made to enter the NICU,” said Manish Kumar of Sultanpur in UP, whose baby is admitted here. He said it with great relief and obligation.
Padma, 25, lost her sixmonth-old son Tejas on December 23. She said she was setting aside her grief to take on the hospital for its negligence so that “no other mother should have to face” what she did. She has gone to the government demanding that she be compensated for the money she had to borrow for her baby’s treatment.
Enraged at the staff, she told TOI that their behaviour with attendants was “merciless and rude”. She recounted how guards at the NICU ward would often remark that no child would come out alive. “I had already spent close to ₹80,000 in private hospitals before I took Tejas to JK Lon on December 22. Suffering from pneumonia, he died the next day,” she said.
Full report on www.toi.in
KOTA HORROR: In 2019, 963 infants had died in the hospital out of 16,915 admissions. In 2018, it was 1,005 from 16,436. On average, the figure has been 1,100 each year since 2014
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