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Row over surgery tables at MCH

By Our Staff Reporter

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, NOV. 10. Post-graduate students of the Dental College here are on the warpath over what they call the lack of adequate facilities for doing facial surgeries at the Medical College Hospital.

The row between the MCH authorities and the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Dental College over the non-availability of surgery tables at the operation theatre at the MCH has been brewing for the past one month.

On Wednesday, scheduled emergency facial surgeries had to be postponed for the second consecutive week, after theatre facility was denied to the oral surgery department. "We put out a list of surgeries to be performed tomorrow, but it was rejected by the Anaesthesiology Department," said a doctor at the oral surgery department.

The doctor said about 20 accident victims with facial fractures had been staying put in the wards for the second week, awaiting surgery. According to him, inordinate delays in surgery would result in the faulty setting of bones.

For the past several years, all surgeries of the department were being conducted at the theatre in the MCH on an assigned day every week. When the major operation theatre `A' complex at the MCH was being renovated, the weekly schedule was changed to two days every month.

The `A' theatre, which now has additional facilities, began functioning two weeks ago.

Facility taken away

S. Rajiv, general secretary of the PG Students' Association, Dental College, said that while other specialities had been given additional surgery facilities, even the existing facility of the college was taken away.

The reason given for refusing theatre facility to the Dental College is that the institution has its own operation theatre, which has been lying idle for the past five years.

"An operation theatre requires an entire structure, including anaesthetist, theatre staff, technicians and in-patient wards, which we have not been allotted. A lot of trauma cases which require extensive reconstructive surgery are coming every week, but we are helpless," a senior doctor at the Dental College said.

Dr. Rajiv said the DME, the Principals of both the MCH and the Dental College and the Health Minister had been apprised of the situation, but any action was yet to be taken.

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