Islamabad : Saleema Meharban was aghast at what she saw during a recent visit to the Mother-Child Hospital for her first-trimester screening: there were two women to one bed in maternity wards with no privacy protections.

For the 27-year-old private school teacher, it was also upsetting to see three to four babies kept in each crib at the special care nursery to their heightened susceptibility to infections.

Though it was her first visit to the hospital, which is part of the city's largest public sector medical institution, PIMS, she decided not to be there for childbirth.

“It’s a terrible sight. Women were crowded in [maternity ward] beds, two to a bed, while the adjacent labour rooms resounded with screams and moans of women delivering babies in the presence of rude medical attendants. I got even more distressed after finding all those women uncovered from the waist down. Probably unwillingly, they’d exposed themselves to strangers because Pakistani women generally never allow their privacy to be breached,” she told ‘The News’.

“I can't put up with all that and will prefer going into labour in a private hospital or even at home because that option though a little heavy on my family’s pocket will give me the due pelvic privacy and the new-born a clean, hygienic environment to breathe in,” she said.

The doctors did acknowledge the women’s right to privacy in parturition but blamed the patients’ misery on the hospital’s 'declining' bed capacity.

“Firstly, our hospital [MCH] hasn’t been expanded since its opening in 1998 with the Japanese funding and secondly, patient arrivals are increasing fast, so we’ve to adjust both mothers and their babies to the limited space available on the premises,” a gynaecologist said on condition of anonymity as she wasn’t authorised to speak to the media.

According to her, the MCH has just 156 beds but has to cater to the influx of obstetric patients from Islamabad as well as Rawalpindi, Murree, Upper Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and Gilgit-Baltistan. They include emergency and referral cases and those, who just walk in and can’t be turned away due to complications.

On average, the hospital attends to 300 outpatients and handles 23 deliveries, including caesarean sections, daily along with other surgical procedures. It has one operating theatre for laparoscopy and three for elective and emergency cases, and four labour room tables.

The doctor said though the number of visitors swelled over the years, the government neither increased the hospital’s bed capacity nor did it recruit more support staff, including nurses, midwives, ward boys and sanitation workers, for better patient care.

She said the MCH had over 90 vacancies, whose filling was blocked by the government’s ban on fresh recruitment.

“After years of neglect by the successive governments, the MCH is struggling to come up with the goods. Two patients on one bed and three to four new-borns in one crib have become the norm. Things will certainly worsen if its expansion is further delayed, more members of support staff are not hired, and patient arrivals are not regulated,” she said.

Another doctor called for the early upgrade of the conventional operating theatres into modular ones as well as the installation of a modern sterilisation plant for infection control at the MCH.

When contacted, PIMS Director Dr Khalid Masud insisted that the hospital was striving to improve patient care with the support of the national health services ministry.

“The Japanese aid agency, JICA, which had helped put up MCH and Children’s Hospital at the PIMS, is working on the expansion of both facilities. Hopefully, the MCH’s bed strength will go up by 50 per cent in two years, but I still say it will be too little given the growing patient loads. We need another 300-bed medical building to do what is expected of us,” he said.

Dr Masud threw his weight behind the patient referral system but insisted that the idea needed political will for execution. He said no government hospital in the country followed that model.

He said admission refusal to patients from outside Islamabad would provoke a backlash, which the hospital couldn’t afford.

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