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Patients in trouble

Fear of violence, lack of transport make it difficult for them to reach hospital

Shaheen Mollah and Tamanna Khan
Fear of violence on the way to hospitals and the small number of vehicles available on the roads during the hartal are making it very difficult for the sick and the injured to get proper medical attention.
On occasion, it becomes life threatening.
Raju Mondol, 16, had an accident at his Dhamrai, Savar, home around 10:00am yesterday. The axe he was chopping wood with got away from him and he cut his leg deeply.
Local doctors asked his guardians to take him to a certain hospital in Dhaka to see if Raju had severed any of his nerves.
But it took Raju's uncle three hours to find a vehicle willing to take Raju to Dhaka, albeit charging almost twice the usual fare for the just-over 30-kilometretrip.
When Raju finally reached National Institute of Traumatology, Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation (Nitor) in Dhaka around 2:00pm, he had become weak due to loss of blood.
Like Raju, many others found it difficult to get to the emergency sections of hospitals.
Nitor's emergency section on an average day deals with more than 110 patients but only 80 patients received medical services yesterday.
Hospital officials pointed out that most of Nitor's patients have fractured
bones and many of them cannot travel on rickshaws, the vehicle most available during hartals. On a normal day, many patients come from outside Dhaka as district hospitals do not usually have all the facilities Nitor provides, they added.
At the emergency section of Dhaka Medical College Hospital, the largest public hospital in the country, 171 patients took treatment in the 12 hours between 12:00am and 12:00pm yesterday.
On a regular day, the section treats around 300 people in those 12 hours.
Many sick people decided to stay put rather than risk going out for medical attention. Journalist Afzal Hossain, who works at a TV station and lives in Narayanganj, had to cancel his pregnant wife's monthly doctor's appointment in the capital because of the hartal.
"Our appointment was on Sunday. Because of the hartal we could neither see the doctor nor have tests done... I could not take the risk of taking her to Dhaka on a rickshaw," he said, adding, "Getting the car out on a hartal day was out of the question considering the current situation in the country." Visiting different public hospitals in the capital, The Daily Star correspondents found that the number of patients at the outdoor sections were almost half of the usual number.
DMCH officials told The Daily Star that on Sunday, the first day of the hartal, only 769 tickets for outdoor patients were sold whilst the section often sees around 1,800 patients on a regular day.
At Dhaka Shishu Hospital, 335 children took treatment or got admitted on Sunday. The number was 628 on Thursday.