CITY’S Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital has started operations after a messy situation caused by fire on Thursday evening. Director of the SSMCH said a total of 1,174 patients, including 72 children, were shifted to other government hospitals after the fire originated at the children’s ward on the second floor of the new building. However, most of the patients have returned to SSMCH in the meantime. Four wards, out of total 13 wards and a burn unit, mainly affected in the fire have kept closed for investigation. Newspapers reported that many important files contain history of the patients lost due to fire incident while attendants of the patients were seeking their files. A child patient died due to suffocation. The hospital currently is not receiving any child patient as the children’s ward was severely affected.
Though the SSMCH has escaped massive causalities anyhow, it is true that such incident may occur at any time in any hospital. Health and Family Welfare Minister Zahid Maleque has correctly pointed out that the fire incident is a lesson for all concerned. It is yet not known the how the fire was originated. However, the Health and the Home Ministries have formed two separate committees to investigate the real reason behind the fire.
We remember the 2011 AMRI Hospital fire in Kolkata that cost lives of 89 patients and was thought to have been caused by a short circuit in the basement. What was most shocking, of the dead there were several Bangladeshi patients. So, the fire incident of SSMCH should be taken as a wake-up call for Bangladesh. The Fire Service and Civil Defence authorities must consider a work plan to check whether the electrical devices installed in the country’s hospitals are up-to-date. It should also check whether every hospital building has been built up maintaining fire safety rules and regulations.
Corruption and irregularities are common in most of the government hospitals where majority doctors, nurses, technicians and other employees allegedly do not give their best services to the patients. Treatment to a patient is not a humanitarian service for them; rather it’s a lucrative business. It is hard for the authorities concerned to take action against them as they are well-organized under the umbrella of political party-backed trade unions.
