Two women delivered stillborn babies at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (Qech), last weekend, due to what sources blame on negligence.<\/p>\n
The Daily Times <\/em>understands that the women were scheduled to have Caesarian sections but anaesthetists were not around at both operations and only showed up seven hours later.<\/p>\n Anaesthetists are specialists who are responsible for managing pain patients suffer during operations and also provide intensive care.<\/p>\n \u201cThe other woman had a seven-hour delay as the anaesthetist showed up at 3pm instead of 8am. A similar incident happened for the other lady,\u201d said a well-placed source at the facility who asked for anonymity.<\/p>\n According to the sources, this is not the first time such a development had happened as the anaesthetists like to do things at their own pace and not according to what the facility demands of them.<\/p>\n We have further learnt that some anaesthetists also recently discharged two patients without operating on them claiming that there was no gauze, yet it was later confirmed that there was plenty of it at the facility.<\/p>\n The issues are coming in weeks after our sister paper Malawi News <\/em>reported that some health workers are torturing patients at Ward 5B by asking them to pay for surgical services or else their operations are rescheduled or not done at all.<\/p>\n But Qech Chief Hospital Administrator, Themba Mhango, described the reports as \u2018hearsay\u2019 until all the procedures to get to the bottom of the matter are thoroughly done.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a long procedure in that each death that occurs in obstetrics and gynecology department is audited or rather investigated by a panel of senior doctors and nurses. That\u2019s where we can get to the bottom of the matter,\u201d Mhango said.<\/p>\n He disclosed that anaesthetists at Qech are overwhelmed, saying the facility has 20 operating theatre rooms against only eight anaesthestics.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have been hiring them to do Locum but it is not helping much. Sometimes, it\u2019s difficult with the current shortages to offer the services consistently and efficiently to meet patients\u2019 expectations,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Executive Director for Health and Rights Education Programme, Maziko Matemba, said the negligence issue has to be taken seriously for the officer(s) in question to be disciplined.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is against medical profession conduct. This job involves people\u2019s lives. Qech is supposed to take action and get to the bottom of this issue.<\/p>\n \u201cI know that many other people have suffered in silence at this hospital due to similar issues. Hospital management should do something other than taking this issue as one of those issues,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Information sourced from the facility indicates that on average, Qech has 30-50 planned operations per day of which about 50-60 percent are actually done.<\/p>\n According to Mhango, the other operations are not done due to either shortage of staff or shortage of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds or lack of supporting services such as water or when sterilisation equipment is not functioning which leads to the scaledown of number of operations.<\/p>\n Again, lack of supporting services like lack of water or when sterilisation equipment is not functioning leads to the scaledown of number of operations.<\/p>\n We have established that there are only four beds in Qech ICU.<\/p>\n Ministry of Health did not respond to our questionnaire which we sent on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two women delivered stillborn babies at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (Qech), last weekend, due to what sources blame on negligence. The Daily Times understands that the women were scheduled to have Caesarian sections but anaesthetists were not around at both operations and only showed up seven hours later. Anaesthetists are specialists who are responsible for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":29984,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49475"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49478,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49475\/revisions\/49478"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}