It was a pandemonium in, of all places, a hospital's intensive care unit (ICU). Parents and attendants rushing out of the room to save the lives of babies under treatment there for heart problems, a few of them recovering after surgery! Several of the baby patients had to be carefully evacuated because they had nasal cannulas and face masks attached for their respiratory disorder and intravenous cannulas inserted into their veins with the tubes dangling precariously. No, this is not a scene from Gaza's Al-Shifa hospital but from the specialised Dhaka Shishu Hospital in the Bangladesh capital, Dhaka.
No one invaded the hospital but a fire in the ICU of the cardiac unit of the hospital led to this unexpected emergency. Mercifully, no life was lost mostly due to prompt evacuation by parents and attendants with help from hospital staff. Before the fire spread to other units, it could be brought under control by fire fighters who also responded to the emergency call promptly enough. Early indication is that the fire broke out from explosion of an air conditioner in the ICU and before the fire could turn worse, all 17 baby and child patients receiving treatment there could be brought out of the facility safely. For a few of these more serious patients disruption of saline and administration of intravenous medicine could be fatal. What effect it will leave on such patients only the physicians concerned can tell.
No such mishap was reported from this hospital earlier although Dhaka Medical College and Hospital (DMCH) had the misfortune to experience one such fire hazard also in its ICU in March 2021, which claimed three lives during evacuation. Before that, a fire at the corona isolation unit of the United Hospital on May 27, 2020 claimed five lives. Now the question is, if the Shishu Hospital had enough arrangement for quick response to such a crisis. To go by the representative of the Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defence (BFSCD), the hospital had no such system other than just fire extinguishers. This leads to the more probing question, if those fire extinguishers could be of any service to control the blaze from turning devastating. Provision of fire extinguishers is no guarantee for bringing fire under control at the initial stage. There must be people who know how to operate those extinguishers.
Once informed of the breaking out of fire, the BFSCD teams reached there within eight minutes and they had to struggle for about an hour to extinguish the blaze. ICUs of hospitals are generally a secluded, confined and closed facility where the greatest danger was from fumes. Let it be noted that the death of diners and shoppers at the Bailey Road Green Cozy Cottage fire tragedy was not from fire but from toxic smoke. The fire fighters smashed some sealed glasses of the ICU at the Shishu Hospital before they could take care of the fire.
The issue that must be considered here is that the hospital was established in 1972 and many of its infrastructural devices have become very old. It is run on a tight budget. More importantly, people in this part of the world are not particularly famous for maintenance of machines, devices and infrastructure. Few hospitals, offices and organisations have records of updated check and supervision of machines and apparatuses. After the winter, it is necessary to check ACs before their operation. Few people take the trouble of doing so. But when it concerns sensitive facilities such as hospitals, slightest laxity must not be entertained. The probe committee formed to investigate the fire incident should not ignore the monitoring and supervisory aspects of machines and apparatuses at the hospital.
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