Struggling to check the spurt in infant deaths at Sishu Bhawan, the State Government on Thursday decided to rope in at least seven doctors from nearby SCB Medical College and Hospital to man the beleaguered paediatric hospital. The hospital witnessed at least five more deaths on Thursday itself, taking the toll to 35 during the past seven days.
“The SCB doctors would be on a deputation to the Sishu Bhawan until further orders and would be joining here from Friday,” said RDC (Central) Bikash Mohapatra after holding a high-level emergent meeting in the paediatric hospital. The meeting was attended among others by the district Collector and members of a technical team, including experts from the SCB and AIIMS, Bhubaneswar.
Against a sanctioned strength of 48 doctors, the Sishu Bhawan has been manned by only 20 doctors for the past several years. The hospital is also facing an acute shortage of paramedics. The biggest paediatrics hospital in eastern India, Sishu Bhawan is receiving more than 300 patients on an average daily at its OPD and nearly 50 of them are admitted here in critical condition every day.
After the sudden surge in casualties last week and an outcry of ‘negligence in treatment’, the State Government has ordered multiple probes to ascertain the causes of the deaths. Even as a technical team led by the DMET is verifying each case of recent deaths individually, all other probe teams have ruled out the allegations of negligence in treatment.
Shockingly, the probe teams have reached the conclusions without examining any of the parents or attendants of the victims. While two attendants earlier had lodged FIRs alleging negligence in treatment at the local labagh police station, one more person registered yet another FIR on Thursday after his ailing daughter died in the hospital in the morning.