CAESAREAN BIRTHS OUT NUMBER NORMAL DELIVERIES AT LAL DED HOSPITAL

By Riahana Maqbool

Patients with complicacies dent numbers: Med Superintendent

Srinagar, July 2: As the Valley’s lone maternity care facility, Lal Ded Hospital is thronged by excessive number of obstetric patients, the rising cesarean rates at the hospital are a cause of concern.

Lal Ded Hospital has the highest number of cesarean operations as of 2013. As per hospital records, 60 percent of the births take place through cesarean.
Records say that 100-150 patients are admitted in the hospital every day. “We often face many problems as the rush of patients is more and it becomes difficult for the staff to deal with them,” an official said.
“The crowd in the labour room is unmanageable and sometimes what the doctors do is that they select some of the patients randomly from the beds and shift them to C-section for cesarean,” said a theatre boy.
Gynecologists in the hospital have a different view of the problem.
“Most of the pregnant ladies nowadays prefer private hospitals and the doctors there prefer cesarean over normal delivery as it hardly takes an hour while the normal delivery means spending more time in the hospital. The private hospitals discharge the patients the next day only and the doctors earn hefty amounts from patients,” says a gynecologist from Lal Ded Hospital.
“If there is a serious complication, these doctors immediately refer them to Lal Ded at the eleventh hour. The doctors in Lal Ded are left with no choice but to go for a cesarean due to late arrival. If a lady goes through a cesarean for the first child there are less chances of a normal delivery later on,” she adds.
As per the hospital records around 80-100 children are born at Lal Ded Hospital every day. Nearly half of them are delivered through caesarean procedure.
A gynecologist practising privately says: “The demographic and socio-economic conditions of the persons living in the rural and urban places affect the outcome of the caesarean births to a large extent. The availability of the medical facilities and other emergency services puts the urbanites in a better position for seeking treatment which may be the driving force behind the higher number of caesarean births in the urban areas.”
Medical Superintendent Lal Ded Hospital, Dr. Mushtaq Rather says: “Yes 60 percent of the births here take place through cesarean. It is because LD is a tertiary-care hospital. Patients with complications from all parts of Kashmir come here and end up in cesarean.
“Sometimes patients come here at the time of delivery. We usually admit patients whose cases are complicated. A few days before, a husband was pleading that his wife could not bear the labour pain and told us to go for the cesarean,” Dr. Rather added.