AIIMS trauma centre designated for Covid again

“There are only 150 beds available for trauma care at the centre currently. What is the need to make it a Covid centre? Especially now when we are seeing that the new variant is causing mild disease in most patients. It is sad that we are losing more patients due to trauma than Covid. The hospital has started a new burns and plastics department and a mother and child block that is still not fully utilised and may be used to treat Covid patients,” said a senior doctor from the hospital, on condition of anonymity.

The hospital’s resident doctors’ association has also written to the AIIMS director stating that even with the lockdown, there was only a 20 to 25% decline in the number of trauma patients coming to the hospital, whereas the infrastructure available gets reduced by 75 to 80% when the trauma centre is moved to the main hospital. “Even when road accidents went down because of lockdown, we saw more cases of violence at home and neighbourhoods. Patients were coming to us with stab and blunt wounds… and now we will have cases of road accidents along with such cases,” said another doctor from the hospital. As per the letter, only 95 beds were available for treatment of trauma patients at the main AIIMS hospital as compared to the 264 available at the stand-alone centre. Only three operation theatres were available instead of six. And, 18 ICU beds were available instead of 38.

“These beds are made available under the existing departments of the main hospital. What this effectively means is if I take in the trauma patients, I am pushing out those who probably need cancer surgeries or other planned surgeries,” said the senior doctor.