Editorial
Hospital equipment rusting away!
Pull up the people responsible
IT is extremely disquieting news that medical equipment worth Taka several crore is lying unused at Shaheed Ziaur Rahman Medical College Hospital in Bogra due to lack of structural facilities and competent technicians and chemists. The idle equipment includes a radiotherapy machine that cost the hospital Tk 19.68 crore.
The results of machines remaining inoperative are obvious. Not only are the patients being deprived of modern treatment but the machines bought with the state's money are also being wasted under most unfortunate circumstances. The planners and the hospital authorities certainly owe an explanation to the people as to why they failed to build a structure where the radiotherapy machine could be installed and used safely. It's another example of the loss and wastage that poor planning can cause. And all this is taking place in a country where millions of poor people are not getting proper healthcare.
The non-availability of technical hands poses a serious problem, too. But the question is why the hospital authorities could not foresee it when they decided to purchase the expensive equipment. The amateurish handling of such an important matter has reduced the life-saving equipment into a showpiece!
It is not the first time that a hospital has been reported to have an equipment it is hard-put to handle. Medical equipment rusting away has been a common enough tale as far as government hospitals go. One wonders why the planners in the health sector cannot improve their performance through ensuring a little better utilisation of our resources. They have to bear in mind that hospital management is now a highly demanding job that should be assigned only to the experts in the field. Otherwise, it will be difficult to prevent repetition of the kind of wastage we now witness at Bogra.
The health planners are expected to find out what went wrong at the Bogra hospital and at other government medical facilities where costly equipment are lying idle or ill-maintained. Someone has to shoulder the responsibility and some mechanism must be evolved for ensuring proper utlisation of costly medical equipment.
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