Patients at MMC made to get CT scan from private clinics

MARDAN: The patients and their attendants on Friday staged a protest demonstration at the Mardan Medical Complex (MMC) after they were reportedly denied the CT scan service and forced to avail facility from a private hospital.

They asked the chief minister, health minister and chairman of the Board of Governors (BoG) to take note of their suffering at the tertiary care hospital.A truck driver, Akbar Khan, said that doctors at Category-D Hospital in Lund Khwar area of rural Mardan referred his two-year old daughter, Urooj to the Accident and Emergency Department of MMC as she had suffered a head injury.

He said the doctor at the MMC advised him to get the CT scan of the child. “When I went there, patients were already sitting outside the CT scan machine room. After an hour, a technician came and asked us to wait as the machine was being repaired. In the meantime, other patients also arrived there. After two hours when patients and their attendants got frustrated, the technician told us to go to a private CT scan machine as its quality was better than the one installed at the MMC,” the truck driver recalled.

He said on hearing this, the patients and their attendants staged a protest demonstration in the hospital, but to no avail.The truck driver said the technician told them the CT scan in MMC would cost them Rs1,300 and while they would pay Rs2,000 and get better quality in the private sector.

Another attendant, Shoaib Khan, also made a similar complaint and said majority of the patients were in critical condition and needed CT scan on urgent basis, but they suffered due to the negligence of the Radiology Department.

“After waiting there in the hope that they would call patients for the CT scan, some employees told us not to waste their time and advised us to go to a private clinic,” he added. “We were told that some people in the Radiology Department discouraged patients and force them to seek the facility from a private sector,” he complained.

Shoaib Khan said all the patients later went to a private CT scan machine but when they returned to the casualty, the doctor was absent from duty.“In the casualty, some hospital workers advised us to take the patients to doctors in their private clinics if they wanted to save their lives,” he said.