The Mahabodhi Burns Centre, Victoria Hospital, Bangalore Medical College - Asia’s biggest burns ward hardly has any place to cater to burns victims. A 45-bedded centre, on an average, caters to 60-75 patients each day. The result is even the corridors of Burns centre are brimming with patients with little or no place for attendants.
When Deccan Herald visited the centre on Monday, five patients were lying in the corridor. Hina Fathima, the acid attack victim from Mysore, was one of them.
A girl from Tumkur, in her late teens, who had set herself on fire for being unable to seek admission to a computer course, was also taken in, in the corridor. She had suffered 90 per cent burns.
A burns centre should have cubicles and isolation wards as burns victims are highly susceptible to infections. But there are no cubicles. Everyone admitted there is in the general ward.
Result: The rate of infection among patients is said to be as high as 40 per cent.There’s one operation theatre in the Burns centre and that too, very poorly lit. It has an operating table which is more than one and a half decades old.
Besides the lack of infrastructure, there are many posts lying vacant there. There are two sanctioned posts for professors, one in Victoria Hospital and the other in Lady Curzon and Bowring Hospital.
Both posts are filled. But in the case of assistant professors, against the sanctioned strength of three professors, none has been posted; all the three posts are lying vacant.
In the lecturers’ category, the number of posts sanctioned is four, but only two have been appointed so far. The worst hit is the nursing section.
On contract
“There should be a batch of 10 nurses per shift round the clock due to the number of patients we get here, but we have only two nurses per shift. They are contract nurses who can be transferred to other departments any time,” said a doctor at the Centre.
For burns centre, we need trained nurses who have specialised in this field, he said. There isn’t a single intensive care unit in the centre though it gets patients not only from Karnataka but also from neighbouring states. India has only two burns centres - one at Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi and the other is the Mahabodhi Burns Centre, Victoria Hospital. The salary of professor, a specialist who has put in over 20 years of service, remains at Rs 23,000 per month!