PAKISTAN: Children's hospital, overwhelmed by quake victims, seeks children's doctors

Record ID: 174139

  • Title: PAKISTAN: Children's hospital, overwhelmed by quake victims, seeks children's doctors
  • Date: 16th October 2005
  • Summary: MORE OF INJURED CHILDREN (4 SHOTS)
  • Embargoed: 31st October 2005 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Pakistan
  • Country: Pakistan
  • Topics: Disasters / Accidents / Natural catastrophes,Health
  • Reuters ID: LVA9H8UR7DMRYLINEO0NFGLFT0QC
  • Story Text: "Where is my mother?" cries a little girl as she is wheeled into an overworked operating theatre in northern Pakistan's main children's hospital.
    South Asia's worst earthquake in 100 years injured more than 62,000 people, many of them children, and a week later Islamabad's Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) is overwhelmed.
    Surgeons and doctors are exhausted after working around the clock and a children's department that has just 220 regular beds is now treating more than 700, many with serious head, back and abdominal injuries.
    Regular wards have overflowed and heavily bandaged, scarred and bruised boys and girls of all ages are lying on makeshift beds in lobbies, corridors, hallways and verandas.
    Hundreds more children are being treated at smaller but similarly crowded facilities and temporary hospitals in Islamabad and at the military hospital in the adjoining town of Rawalpindi.
    Many are survivors of schools that collapsed in the worst hit North West Frontier Province and Pakistani Kashmir when the quake struck during morning lessons.
    An estimated 38,000 people died in the disaster.
    Professor Zaheer Abbassi, head of paediatric surgery at PIMS, said there was an urgent need for more doctors and surgeons and appealed for foreign volunteers.
    "We are coping, but just coping. There are many, many problems," Abbassi told Reuters on Saturday (October 15).
    "Obviously logistic problems. We do not have enough staff with us. Surgeons are in limited number. The nursing and paramedical staff are in limited numbers. And the bed capacity is limited. The operating theatres were not geared for treating hundreds of children in a short span of time," he elaborated.
    Abbassi said his doctors were sometimes doing 24-hour shifts and then just getting a few hours sleep before they are up again for another 24 hours.
    A specialist Russian surgical team with vast experience treating injuries from earthquakes and other disasters has been carrying out 40 or more complex operations a day.
    Abbassi appealed for more volunteers, especially surgeons.
    The head of the Russian team, Professor Leonid Roshal, said the disaster was one of the worst he had known despite working with victims of most major earthquakes in the past 15 years.
    "No country could have prepared for this," he said. "Many countries prepare disaster plans, but I don't know one country that is ready for this kind of situation. And Pakistan is a very poor country and doesn't have enough equipment."
    He said he hoped the peak of emergency cases was approaching, after hundreds of children were brought in the past two days.
    But with so many injured and a majority of them children and only serious cases with good survival chances making it to PIMS, Abbassi said he feared not.
    He said the numbers they had seemed "to be only the tip of the iceberg" and they were expecting more children over the next one or two weeks.
    However, there was one silver lining to the grim situation.
    Abbassi said for some strange reason the children were coping with the situation better that adults.
    "The children, to my amazement, are very brave," he said.
    " Many of them are actually settling quite nicely. Although they are perhaps not fully with it (yet). They are perhaps not yet focussing on their future problems. Or probably the gravity of the whole situation is not (yet) registered," he added.
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