Sans doctors, 8 ventilators lie idle in Lunawada hospital

Vadodara: At a time when most cities and hospitals are running out of ventilators as Covid-19 hospitalisation continues to rise, Lunawada in Mahisagar district has the luxury of having eight unused ventilators.
Reason? There are no doctors at the Cottage Hospital in Lunawada to operate these.
The ventilators have been procured during and after the first wave of Covid-19.Sources said that three of these ventilators were procured by the district administration while the remaining five were provided by the government. The difficulty, however, is that the hospital does not have a physician, anaesthetist, intensivist or pulmonologist. While there is a desperate need to put them to use, but there is none to put a patient on the machine and then monitor it.
Mahisagar district collector R B Barad said that the hospital even did not have a physician and a private practitioner was roped in temporarily. “Ventilators need round-the-clock experts. We have raised a demand for a physician with the state government,” he said.
Sources added that the re-elected representatives of the district had also raised the issue with the state government. Till a doctor is appointed at the hospital, the precious equipment may not be of much use.