Mangalore: ICU at Wenlock Hospital Needs Immediate Care

Sudipto Mondal/The Hindu

• Only six beds cater to patients from eight districts 
• Twenty more beds to the unit planned
• Shortage of staff is said to be the biggest problem

Mangalore, Aug 8: Vishwanath (55) of Kolya died on Wednesday and Babu (45) of Siddapura in Madikeri died on Thursday morning at the Government Wenlock Hospital here. Both of them are said to have died under similar circumstances. They had consumed pesticide and wanted to die. They spent their last few days in critical condition at the Wenlock hospital. Neither of them could be admitted to the general intensive care unit (ICU) of the hospital as there was no room.

The 160-year-old, 700-bed Wenlock hospital gets referrals from Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, Hassan, Chikmagalur, Kodagu and Uttara Kannada districts and Kasargod and Kannur districts of Kerala.

However, the hospital has only six beds at its general ICU for people from almost eight districts. “The competition for the beds is intense. No sooner has one patient left the unit than another is brought in,” said district surgeon J. Prabhudev. An attendant at the ICU claims that she was constantly haunted by scenes of patients’ relatives pleading with doctors. “Some even go to the extent of threatening the doctors to admit their ailing family members,” she said.

Dr. Prabhudev said that expansion of the ICU was not a tough task and there were funds for the same. The hospital authorities were in the process of identifying land for expansion, he said and added that efforts were on to add another 20 beds to the ICU.

But, the problem was an acute shortage of staff nurses. “The staff pattern of the hospital was last revised over 50 years ago. At prerest, there are only 100 staff nurses in the hospital,” he said.

Not more than 35 of them are on duty at a given point of time, attending to 705 beds. Resident medical officer P. Saroja, who is in-charge of day-to-day operations, said that the nurse-to-patient ratio should be 1:5 for general wards and 1:1 in the case of ICUs.

Unless the Government created more posts, new nurses could not be hired. “The hospital has expanded by leaps and bounds in the last 50 years. A burns ward, cardiac ICU, paediatric ICU and neo-natal ICU have been added but the number of posts for nurses remains the same,” Dr. Prabhudeva said.

The health administration has started spending sleepless nights owing to shortage of nurses at the recently opened paediatric centre. The centre has 15 nurses against the sanctioned 53. “In such a situation quality is the biggest casualty. It is unfair on the staff as well as the patients,” Dr. Prabhudeva said.