Hospital loses on an average three child a day; docs say most extreme cases get referred here
The civil hospital's neonatal unit and doctors may have been given a clean chit following a preliminary inquiry by a three-member committee set up to look into the death of nine newborn babies in a day. But for the hospital, the largest in Asia, the death of four or five children every day seems to be the norm. The doctors and staff working at the hospital cite a host of reasons for the scenario, none of which they say has to do with the infrastructure.
"This hospital gets around 5500 neonatal cases a year. Of these, majority are referrals . A referral case is a case that has been referred from some other hospital, private or government," said a professor and neonatal specialist working in the unit.
"This being a civil hospital first and foremost we accept all cases. Often when a case comes to as the condition of the newborn has already deteriorated severely. Per se the number of deaths may seem higher to you but you have to see it in the backdrop of the severity of the cases that come to us," said the doctor.
Most cases in the neonatal unit are of preterm and extremely underweight babies. Against an average body weight of 2.5 kg for a healthy newborn, most of these babies weigh less than 1 kg. This also means they have poorly developed organs.
The hospital classifies its patients in the neonatal units as inborn and outborn. Outborn refers to babies that were not born in civil hospital. "Many of our neonatal patients come from district that don't have any neonatal facilities in the first place. Often these cases are referred to us after a baby is born when in fact it would have been better if the mother had come to us before delivery," said the doctor.
"In such cases, the baby's chance of survival is already bleak because it is a premature. But the time lost and infection that happens as the newborns travels from one place to another further deteriorates their chance of survival," said a doctor.
A nurse who works in the neonatal unit said it has been her observation that premature children born in Civil Hospital have a better chance of survival than those brought here. "Perhaps it is because they immediately get access to a neonatal unit," said the nurse.
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