“No beds and trolleys are available. Please take the patient somewhere else”. This is the stock reply of authorities to patients at the emergency department of Nizams Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS). Despite the tag of a super-speciality hospital, NIMS has only 40 beds and ten trolleys, doubling up as beds, for patients in its emergency ward.
Patients from all parts of the State and even from outside with serious illness are referred to this tertiary hospital. And yet, they struggle to get admitted in the casualty, because authorities resist admitting them due to lack of beds. Extremely critical trauma patients, who can't be shifted to other hospital, are treated on a trolley in the emergency ward.
“I broke my leg in an accident but they refused to accept me immediately. My relatives had to argue with the authorities for few hours before I received treatment. Till then, I was kept waiting on a trolley near the entrance of the emergency ward,” recalls Md. Safiullah, resident of Moula Ali.
“Lack of beds has been a problem here since past few years. There's no improvement in the situation. Earlier, there were 25 trolleys but now 15 trolleys are under repair. Situation is tough for both health workers and patients,” says a casualty doctor.
The casualty even lacks basic facilities like air-conditioning. “I had to spend Rs. 600 to purchase a table fan for my son, admitted in the casualty. We came here with high hopes but nothing seems to work normally in this hospital,” complains Narasimha Murthy, who came from Ramagundam and his son has a renal kidney ailment.
No diagnostic services
The emergency department does not provide immediate or round-the-clock diagnostic services. The admitted patients wait for at least half a day for the laboratory test results to arrive.
“We had a laboratory exclusively for emergency. But the lab was shut down unknown reasons,” another physician says.
“There is a huge demand for beds in NIMS. Patients from districts bring recommendation letters of their local MLAs for admissions. But these letters too are not honoured,” says Ramappa, a patient from Bidar.
