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Crime

Surgeries using flashlight, what’s next?

By: Karthik :+: Under: Crime, It Happens Only in India, Science
On: ⋅ July 25, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment
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A flashlight saves lives in South India.

Image from Chealion

In some very disturbing news, the Press Trust of India reports that surgeries deep in the South, Tirunelveli to be specific are carried out with battery flashlights aka. torch lights.

In a shocking instance of poor infrastructure in government hospitals, surgeons of the Tirunelveli Government Hospital in Tamil Nadu are often forced to use battery-powered torchlight during surgeries due to frequent power problems.

At least 50 percent of the operations were carried out using torchlight in between as the lights provided at the operation theatre went off due to power fluctuation, a senior surgeon of the hospital in Tirunelveli, about 150 km from here, said. “The generator takes a long time to start. We cannot wait once, we have started the operation, so we prefer to use torchlight,” the surgeon said on condition of anonymity.

This reminds me of the many surgeries performed in the war zone, but this is peace time, in a normal country for crying out loud.

To add fuel to the fire, the Dean of the hospital has dismissed these stories as rumors, while the doctors working there claim otherwise.

Though the hospital had the latest gadgets for performing dialysis, heart surgery etc. power supply was a major problem, the surgeon informed. Dean of the Hospital Dr. Hemalatha admitted that there was power problem, but denied operations were being performed using torchlight.

But most of the surgeons at the hospital said ‘Torch light operations are being carried out.’ Doctors regretted that no serious action was taken to repair the generator. The situation was bad in almost all operation theatres including the one in the maternity wing. The refrigerators at the operation theatres of the neuro-ward and the ENT ward also were not functioning for the past eight months, they charged.

In a country where you have to bribe cremation center guards to use the facility, this piece of news hurts in more places than one. It is one thing to pay people to use facilities that are “free’, it is another to put people in harms way. If my options were a torch light operation and a child surgeon, I would prefer neither.

And if you thought India was the only country where such things happened, Australia followed suit.

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