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Kidney patients outage-struck

Sufferings mount as electricity gone for 6 hours on trot

Mahbuba Zannat
Suffering of around 250 patients at National Institute Of Mental Health (NIMH) and National Institute of Kidney Diseases and Urology (NIKDU) took acute turn yesterday due to power outage for six hours at a stretch.
When power goes off, the hospital authorities usually try to get it from generators to run the activities partially. But the generators could not bear the burden for over four and a half hours. So, the services at the hospitals were hampered and deteriorated much on the day.
The patients suffered bitterly in this hot and humid weather, said Dr Golam Rabbani, director of NIMH. The power supply was disconnected in the area for removing the trees fallen on the electric lines, he said.
Though the power supply authorities were supposed to issue a notice in this regard, the hospital authorities did not get any, said Rabbani.
"Our activities were almost stopped for sudden power outage and I had to work sitting under a tree," he added.
When contacted, the power supply authorities claimed that they served notice earlier.
While visiting NIKDU, attendants of the patients were seen holding hand fans while children were crying in darkness.
Only four emergency operations out 12 were carried out with the help of the generator. The serial for the operation theatre will be longer as very few surgeries were conducted today (Saturday), said nurses at NIKDU.
The air coolers were not working since the morning though some fans and lights were on from 8:00 am to 12:30 pm getting power from the gener-ator, which remained stopped, they said while talking to this correspondent at 1:00pm yesterday.
Six-year old Arafat was vomiting continuously for excessive heat at the postoperative ward while his mother was holding a hand fan to cool her baby.
No pathological tests and Lithotripsy (medical fragmentation of stone) took place yesterday while X-ray and ultrasonogram was stopped at 12:30pm.
Ali Akbar, a 52-year-old man who has been suffering from kidney problem, was sitting in front of the counter at 1:00pm as the doctors asked him for urine and blood test.
"I am waiting here for two hours. But no body told me anything," said Akbar who came from Gopalganj.
The pathologists said every day around 100orl20 patients come for pathological tests. But no pathological tests were carried out yesterday due to the power outage from 8:00am to 2:00pm.
"If power does not come by 2:00pm, we will not be able to
provide hemodialysis to the patients in 2nd shift," said a nurse at the hemodialysis unit adding that they can provide dialysis support to some 25 patients in a shift.
Talking to The Daily Star, Dr Firoz, director of NIKDU, said he was in a meeting at the ministry concerned and nobody informed him about this power outage.
"But some people told me that the power supply authorities informed about the power outage through the loudspeaker, " he said.
The Suhrawardi Hospital also face load-shedding problem though it was not severe yesterday. The patients here alleged that that they did not have power from morning to noon on Friday.
The Desa control room at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar informed that every two or three months they have to trim the trees, as their branches often ride on the power cables.
"From the Prime Minister's residence to Shishu Mela, we have to trim the branches of trees and so we have to cut off the power supply," said Zakir Hossain, junior assistant manager of Desa, claiming that they issued notice to all the hospitals in this regard.