S Twelve years after it was conceived, the much hyped Super Specialty Hospital (SSH) of Kashmir has no surgical intensive care unit (SICU) of its own. The five advanced surgical departments of the institute latch on the space-constrained ICU of the nearby SMHS Hospital for saving patient lives.
An official at GovernmentMedical College Srinagar said that a 13-bedded SICU was set up at the SSH twoyears ago, with an expenditure of crores. However, with no staff allocated torun the Unit, it has been locked up and is unusable for providing life supportto patients undergoing surgeries at the hospital. “The ICU has 13 ventilatorsand state-of-the-art equipment but unfortunately all of this is gathering dusthere,” he said.
The primary reason for the delay in making the ICUfunctional, the official said, was that the staff that had been recruited forSSH Hospital have been posted at other hospitals of GMC Srinagar. In addition,the official said, the department of anesthesia of GMC Srinagar had expressedits inability to allocate doctors for the SICU of the hospital citing “grossstaff crunch” as reason.
The hospital was started “partially” in 2016 when threedepartments were shifted from SMHS Hospital to the new premises. In the courseof past two years, five surgical departments, out of the total eight, were alsoshifted to the hospital. However, a senior doctor working at SSH said that theseadvanced surgical departments have not completely moved their base to the hypedhospital due to unreliability of the available facilities there. “Take forexample neurosurgery department. They continue to run from SMHS Hospital andhave a satellite unit at SSH,” the doctor said, adding that it was primarilythe lack of life support system that was a bottleneck.
“All surgical departments,” the doctor said, “do only verysafe and less complicated cases at SSH while the complicated cases are stilldone at SMHS Hospital.” He further said that the mandate of SSH was to carryout advanced surgeries. “Which surgeon would take the risk of a complicatedsurgery like that of brain, heart or cancer when he knows that there is nobackup system to sustain the patient’s life,” he said.
The lack of SICU at SSH, the doctor said, had put the entireload of these additional advanced surgical departments on SMHS Hospital’s SICUwhich is marred by constraints of space. “SMHS Hospital is an 850-beddedhospital and there are only eight ventilators for this huge hospital that caterto the load from entire Kashmir,” the doctor said.
In-charge medical superintendent SSH, Dr Shabir Ahmed,acknowledged that the lack of SICU was an impediment to making the hospitalfully functional. “We have requested GMC to make arrangements for making theSICU functional many times,” he said. He further said that technicians andnurses could be “managed” but it was primarily the dearth of resident staff inanesthesia department that had become a bottleneck.