NEW DELHI, July 28: Outside the radiotherapy department at the cancer department of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), a patient awaits his turn. He has missed seven days of daily therapy. The reason: On all the seven days the radiotherapy department was shut as technicians failed to report for duty because of the strike.There are hundreds of such cases which have piled up over the last week. Doctors in the strike-affected hospitals are reworking their schedules to accommodate the backlog of surgery cases and the various tests that were not conducted in the last eight days.With technicians on strike till yesterday, no operations were carried out in hospitals and only a couple of emergency cases were taken up. As a result, hospitals are now swamped with surgery cases. The CT Scan unit at AIIMS gets an average of 25 to 30 cases in a day. Since July 20, on an average, the doctors managed to carry out just a couple of tests. ``The air-conditioning staff was also on strike. We could not have run the equipment for very long without the air-conditioning working on full strength,'' says a doctor at the unit. ``Also, after a couple of days of the strike, the patients who were given appointments stopped coming.''The appointments for CT Scan at AIIMS are given three to four months in advance. The doctors now say that they will have to accommodate at least four extra patients everyday. With a backlog of 200 cases and another 25 odd cases coming in daily, technicians lab feel that they will be able to clear the backlog in a month's time.At the AIIMS cardiology department, two to five angiograms are done a day. The doctors say that around 20 angiograms scheduled for last week could not be done. They are hopeful of finishing these by the end of the week. Across the road at the Safdarjung hospital, where there are 20 to 25 eco-cardiograms done a day, cardiologists say that the ``few cases'' that were not done last week will be cleared as and when there is time.
