Lack of facilities put patients in hardship

All seems to be not good with Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research situated at KR Hospital premises. Space congestion, shortage of doctors and equipment has become major set back.

On an average 100-150 patients with cardaic related problems visit the hospital daily for treatment and check up. The patients have to first wait in long queue to register their names, next to get done ECG, followed by collection of report, to meet doctors. Again, for further tests like treadmill, Echocardiogram they have to stand in long queue. By this time the patients get frustrated only by waiting. The situation of senior citizens, mother holding the little kids for long time to get treatment is unimaginable.

Being equipped with two Echocardiogram and 12 ECG machines, it takes around 20-30 minutes to diagnose a patient, some times depending on the condition of the patient the time consumed is even more. In the meanwhile if an emergency case arrives, they have to be attended first and all other patients continue to wait. According to sources 8 to12 emergency cases comes daily. This further increases the waiting time of other patients.

The patients are called on first come first serve basis issuing token. As the number of patients waiting to get treatment are more, many times the token will be exhausted before 12 pm. As a result many of patients who have come from far off places, can be seen helplessly waiting in the OPD Waiting Lounge. Most of them have to come back next day to get a fresh appointment. Not willing to take a chance some of them stay back, sleeping overnight in the corridor, so as not to miss the next day's treatment.

Shortage of cardiologists, and staff is another problem. It has become hard not only for doctors to handle the patients, whereas even patients are suffered at large extent.

A patient named Nagaraj from Bannur said he is prepared to wait the whole day to get an appointment for the next day and requested the concerned officials to take appropriate measures to ease the problems.

Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Director Dr CN Manjunath agreed that the problem exists but said that people can take prior appointment over phone before visiting the hospital. “The problem will be eased after the construction of 350 bedded hospital on KRS Road, for which construction begins from August,” he added.

Fact File

A record of 37,000 outpatients were treated while 4,400 were admitted as in-patients in 2012. 16,000 Eco-Cardiograms and 2,200 cardiac cath lab procedure(Cardiac catheterisation) have been performed, in which 500 were Angioplasty and other procedures 50.