Oxygen shortage takes toll on patients in Jodhpur dist

JODHPUR: Failure in ensuring timely availability of oxygen continues to wreak havoc on the lives of patients. Delay in providing oxygen to the serious patients requiring quick attendance is proving fatal for such patients with low saturation.
One such patient from Pali district Pappu Singh, who was rushed to MDM Hospital on Sunday with an oxygen saturation level below 70, kept waiting to be attended to at the hospital bench and finally succumbed on the bench itself while his brother pleaded around for attention.
“I requested all there at the hospital to provide him with oxygen at least until a bed was arranged but none came to see him,” said his brother Ishwar Singh.
According to sources, many such patients, who are being rushed to the hospitals for want of oxygen are succumbing on the stretchers before the admission and such deaths are going unaccounted for as Covid-19 deaths. Some relatives of such patients also claimed that the oxygen cylinders attached with most of the stretchers were empty and thus providing no relief to the patients, who were in immediate need of oxygen.
On the other hand, lack of coordination between the hospitals and proper monitoring of the availability of oxygen in the hospitals endangered the life of over a dozen patients at a satellite hospital, Mandore here on Saturday evening.
With shortage of oxygen, the medical college administration directed the hospital administration to arrange for their shifting to other centres and sent the ambulances for their shifting.
But given the resistance of the relatives of the patients with apprehensions about their condition, the shifting was held up and steps were taken to arrange the oxygen in the hospital itself.
According to in-charge of hospital Sunita Bhansali, the decision of shifting the patients had been taken in view of shortage of oxygen.
This is despite the fact that some senior officers have been given charge of monitoring of different services like beds, oxygen etc. and hospital administrations have been advised to place their demands well in advance considering the situation.