Paediatric care in low- and middle-income countries often suffers a fate of inadequate infrastructure, workforce shortages and overburdened intensive care units. The case is so, mostly due to limited resources and a strained budget. Paediatric care in Karachi suffers a similar fate, with a reported shortage of paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), despite yearly budget increases that seem to go nowhere substantial.
Major government hospitals in Karachi altogether house barely 2,200 beds, 136 ventilators and 309 incubators for their paediatric wards and emergencies. Given the high fertility rate in Sindh (3.6 per woman) along with a disturbingly high infant mortality rate (60 per 1000 live births), Karachi’s inadequacy of current resources goes without saying.
As a result of limited facilities, parents of infant patients are routinely turned away from public hospitals. Daily-wage earners and middle-class families, who the hospitals are primarily meant to support, rarely have the means to seek treatment at private hospitals. Amidst a debilitating struggle between waiting for a spot in a ward and waiting to conjure enough money to save their child’s life, many parents end up losing their child to the deadly illness of bureaucracy.
We must ask the system and those who uphold it – are these natural deaths? Or is this negligence? Why does the fundamental right to healthcare sit behind a paywall? Without adequate and accessible resources, trained professionals, essential medical supplies and digital health technologies, we are sending out a message that says: those who cannot afford healthcare do not deserve it. And it is an exceptionally dangerous message.
Every penny must be accounted for. Thorough audits are essential. And required facilities must be provided by the government. Public hospitals in Karachi must be strengthened enough to accommodate the city’s own children.
