WE are shocked to learn that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU), the country's leading medical university, is being run without an emergency unit since its inception. There is no denying that training in handling emergency is an elementary part of a young doctor's curriculum. Students of orthopedics department of the university have to resort to an adjacent hospital and have to be attached there for three months to get firsthand knowledge to deal with emergency patients. This is ludicrous to say the least. Moreover, the sick and the injured come to this hospital for succour on an emergency only to know that the establishment does not have such facilities. This risks loss of time and possible death. A year and a half has passed since the foundation stone of the emergency department was unveiled, and it is surprising that the authorities cannot tell when the department will start functioning. That it took the authorities 17 years to realise that the BSMMU needs an emergency unit is absurd. More preposterous is that even after it has been approved, the authorities have sat on the project for one and a half years and it has not yet been set into motion. This is a classic case of bureaucratic red-tapism. This shows a total apathy to the plights of patients and the very idea of medical education as a whole.

The Health Ministry should take the errant BSMMU officials to task. Also an immediate establishment of a fully functional and state of the art emergency unit at BSMMU is the order of the day.