A man who taught trauma care ends up with brain trauma due to pothole on recently built road

A retired medical professor, who used to teach primary trauma care and treatment of patients with severe injuries, is himself facing immense trauma and battling for life at an intensive care unit of a private hospital for the last few days after he was severely injured due to a pothole on a road that was recently revamped under a World Bank-funded initiative in the Old City area of Karachi.

Prof Dr Saeed Minhas had just stepped out of the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) after watching Shakespeare’s King Lear along with his wife and three sons when he stepped into a pothole on the newly-constructed MR Kayani Road that also houses the Supreme Court of Pakistan Karachi Registry.

After stepping into the pothole, Dr Minhas could not maintain his balance and fell on the ground. As the street lights on the recently revamped road were off, a fast-moving vehicle ran him over, causing serious head injuries to him.

“Prof Saeed Minhas was rushed to a recently established trauma centre near Civil Hospital Karachi, a multi-billion project of the Sindh government, but the state-of-the-art trauma centre’s CT scan machine was not functioning and the doctors on duty could not assess the damage to his brain and start treatment,” one of the members of Dr Minhas’s family told The News on Saturday.

The retired professor, who had saved numerous lives as the head of the one of the orthopaedics units of Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC), Karachi, during his 40 years of service as a trauma specialist, lay unconscious at a stretcher in the trauma centre helplessly when his colleagues came to know of his ordeal and decided to shift him immediately to a private hospital.

“Dr Minhas was taken to the trauma centre adjacent to Civil Hospital hoping that it would have all the facilities for the treatment of a patient in extreme trauma but it lacked the basic equipment. Its CT scan machine was not functioning,” a family member of Dr Minhas said, adding that later, with the help of his colleagues, he was shifted to the private health facility.

However, at the private hospital, his family was first asked to pay eight hundred thousand rupees in advance and refused to start treatment before the payment. As the family could not immediately arrange the money, Dr Minhas’s colleagues paid the amount to have the treatment started.

Civil society protests

A group of concerned citizens, including former judges, doctors, lawyers, social activists and government representatives, gathered under the banner of the Karachi Citizens Forum and demanded of the government and judiciary to provide justice to Dr Minhas, who spent his entire life to treat injured, take care of patients with extreme trauma and teach primary trauma care but was battling for life due to the poor road infrastructure and lack of health facilities in the city.

In a social media post, Dr Farhan Essa, a renowned academic, called for an investigation into the serious accident of Dr Minhas as he was injured on a road that was recently built with millions of rupees but still had potholes and open manholes, taken to a government hospital built with billions of rupees but lacking the CT scan facility and then taken to a private hospital where money was demanded even before the treatment was started.

Govt to bear expenses

On the request of his colleagues and doctors, especially Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre Executive Director Dr Seemin Jamali, Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah announced that the Sindh government would bear the expenses of Dr Minhas’s treatment, after which the provincial health department asked the private hospital to send all the bills to them, instead of the family.