THE description of the treatment at the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU) ICU and the condition of the general area belie belief. If that is the state of the premier public hospital of the country very little can be left to the imagination about the condition of other public hospitals.

We will not be very much off the mark to suggest that the state of the BSMMU ICU, as depicted in a recent report in this newspaper, is fairly representative of the conditions of the other departments in the BSMMU, and indeed of the other public hospitals in the country.

An intensive care unit requires the highest degree of sanitatisation and cleanliness to ensure that the undertreatment patients are free from all possible infection. The picture and the description of the attendants of the patients making the corridor a temporary home, and that is being allowed under the nose of the hospital administration, speak poorly of the general state of affairs of the public health service.

What does one make of the premier hospital, which also happens to be a medical university too, where patients' attendants have to remind the nurses of the ICU to administer medicines, after having prepared and procured the medicines too? What can you call an ICU whose corridor is cluttered with eating utensils and personal stuff of the attendants? One has not heard of an ICU patients consuming food other than those produced in the hospital kitchen. It is incomprehensible that outsiders should be asked to assist the nurses in administering treatment to patients in the ICU.

One wonders why attendants of patients have to scurry for medicines, and one assumes that for an ICU patient these are lifesaving medicines, when these should be available with the ICU. For patients in intensive care lifesaving medicines must be at hand. What if the relative cannot procure the medicine quickly? After all, ICU treatment is not for free, and it is very expensive too, and thus one would expect that all the necessary medicines would be readily available for immediate administration when needed.

To say the least, there cannot be a shoddier picture of a hospital's ICU than that we have come across in the report. We are surprised too that the administration is unable to ensure the required standard of the department, the apparent helplessness discerned in the statement of the Director of BSMMU. The only deduction that one can make is that the concerned persons are least bothered about the department or they are busy elsewhere.

The BSMMU is not doing the patients any favour. After all, the patients are paying through their nose for the