Jammu and Kashmir floods: Srinagar hospitals may take a month to restore services

SRINAGAR: Doctors and paramedics joined volunteers in clearing six-inch nauseating slush that this month’s devastating floods left in Srinagar’s six major state-run hospitals. Temporary outpatient departments have started functioning, but healthcare officials say it may take a month to restore normal services.

“We have started the OPD on the third floor and we are cleaning the second floor for admitting critical cases,” said Muneer Masoodi, who administers the GB Pant Pediatric Hospital, the first facility that sunk in the night of September 7. “Routine functioning of the hospital will take nearly 20 days.”

With patients, attendants and doctors trapped inside, the city’s main hospitals crippled within a few hours of Jhelum breaching its dykes. The Bone and Joints Hospital suffered a day ahead as a torrent breached into it. Then the waters gushed into the others hospitals downstream: the Children’s Hospital, Lala Ded Maternity Hospital, the main SMHS hospital, Gousia Hospital and, finally, the Jhelum Valley Medical College Hospital. In between fell six privately run hospitals.

The impact of inundation was the same and abrupt in all the hospitals: electricity was the first to go, and then the diesel generators too failed. Kitchens were soon inundated and most of the diagnostic equipment and drug stores, located in the basements in most, became useless and inaccessible.

People — patients, attendants and staff — waited for rescue that never came. Every time a chopper would fly around or a boat come nearby, flickering hopes would take gasps of life. Melancholy would take over when they go away.

At the Children’s Hospital, three young doctors managed salvaging eight oxygen cylinders that helped some newborns survive a day more. They offered thirsty attendants dextrose and eventually started distributing a dry mix of rice and sugar as meals. This hospital, located in the cantonment area, was the first to sink. No help came for about 50 hours and by the time army rescuers reached, 14 babies had died, said doctors and attendants. Many more died later.

The situation in Kashmir’s major gynecological hospital was horrific. With more than 200 women admitted, some with fresh surgeries, doctors fled when they were needed most. Rescuers reached after three days, when scores of youth accessed the hospital in boats and rafts and started evacuation. The most serious cases were shifted to a private building near Lal Chowk and later to the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences Medical College (SKIMS), the only tertiary-care hospital that remained untouched. Attendants talk of the heroics of some alleged “stone pelters” who evacuated a patient in labour pain.

SMHS, the main hospital of the city, was the first to manage effective attention of the society. Civilians living in Nawab Bazaar broke a wall to make access and then got rafts to evacuate around 900 patients and their attendants. They had parked trucks near Pathern Masjid for shifting them to SKIMS. But the absence of basic facilities like oxygen and access to drug stores led to 13 deaths within a few hours. As the main healthcare set up collapsed, Kashmir managed itself by relying heavily on two factors. First, peripheral hospitals managed patients at district levels. Director Health Saleem-ur-Rehman said for 16 days ending September 20, as many as 5,77,595 patients reported to the OPDs in Kashmir’s all district hospitals and 34,577 of them were admitted. They also conducted 1,435 major surgeries, he said.

Then, four city hospitals became the new lifeline: SKIMS, the army hospital at BB Cantt, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Hospital at Rainawari and private sector Ahmad Hospital on the bypass.