Srinagar:
A leading charity organisation of United Kingdom, is conducting free surgeries on children with heart problems at a hospital here, a second such workshop at the initiative of Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah.
The founder of the organisation-Healing Little Hearts, Dr Sanjiv Nachani, along with his team of 10 specialists, is conducting the workshop at Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) for the second time, after it conducted seven free surgeries earlier in March.
Nachani said the programme was started?at the initiative of the Chief Minister, who took keen interest to invite the team to the state.
He said the organisation is deeply interested to help the Cardiology Department at SKIMS and perform more such surgeries in future for free.
The organisation has performed 450 such surgeries on small children in the last seven years with a success rate of more than 96 per cent, he said.
"The uniqueness of what we do is that the patients are very small and hence it becomes a lot more complex. And then the patients are brought to the hospital very late here as compared to the West, which makes it even more difficult," he told reporters here.
However, Nachani lamented the lack of infrastructure at the hospital, saying the institute needs to invest more in personnel and physical infrastructure.
"The Cardiac ICU here is very small. If we have to handle 10-12 patients at one time, the ICU needs to be bigger. The space between the beds is also little which makes patient care difficult," he said.
Nachani said the hospital needs special breathing machines for babies as they need such support for a longer duration.
"We need special pumps here to give accurate doses of medicine to the babies, which is very essential," he said.
He said the hospital has only one Echo scanner, which is shuffled between ICU and OPD.
"The equipment needs to be modernised. The developmental needs of the hospital need to be taken care of," he said.
Director, SKIMS, Showkat Zargar, said the department was established in 1980 and it suffered a lot due to turmoil.
"The equipment we have is very old and most of it was not modernised. But we are in the process of doing so," he said.