Patients at Lady Reading Hospital Peshawar face severe problems because of the lack of basic health facilities in the busiest hospital of the provincial capital.
LRH is the hospital that bears the burden of most of the terrorist incident victims and thousands of people daily visit the emergency of the hospital.
However, despite of the fact the patients kept on arriving at LRH, still there are only 250 stretchers available for the patients that can not walk due to their illness.
But due to the dearth of stretchers it was witnessed that the patients are being carried by their male attendants to the wards and emergency department.
The Frontier Post has also learnt that most of the available stretchers are old and not in their best shape which adds to the miseries of the patient instead of helping them.
Bakhshish Khan from Nizam Pur who had arrived at LRH after his legs broke in an accident said that he felt severe pain while being carried on the hospital stretcher.
The stretcher, he said was not stable and the broken flour of the hospital gave him more pain.
He further said that he also felt pain in his back as he was taken to the doctor on the stretcher.
A number of stretchers do not have wheels and attendants of the patients have to pull these stretchers.
It was also learnt that patients have to give Rs30 and CNIC to the security guard at the main entrance of the hospital in order to get stretcher.
Abbas Khan who was serving as store keeper at the hospital admitted that most of the stretchers were old and rickety with damaged wheels because of the hospital floor that had pits in it and no maintenance work had been done since long.
He added that there should be a separate pathway for the wheel chairs and stretchers in the hospital so that the patients could go smoothly and securely from one ward to another and this way there would be less wear and tear in the stretchers.
He also said that the stretchers had foam sheets on them to provide comfort to patients with injuries but most patients took the foams with them on being discharged from the hospital which was why most stretchers were without any foam or soft sheet.
Dr. Hayat Khan, the Public Relation Officer at LRH, said that two hundred stretchers had been ordered which should be enough to put an end to the complaints of patients.
