Medical equipment worth more than Tk 15 crore have for long been lying idle in Shaheed Ziaur Rahman Medical College Hospital in Bogra because of shortage of technicians and the absence of supporting machines.
The hospital’s director Brigadier General Md Afzalur Rahman admitted to the fact and said that many equipment such as those for magnetic resonance imaging and computer tomography scan had been in service.
The cath lab in the cardiology department is likely to start functioning in two months, he added, as technicians will complete their training in a month and a half.
Md Majibar Rahman, assistant professor of cardiology, said that equipment worth Tk 5.54 crore had been lying idle since the tenure of the immediate-past caretaker government. The department was opened just after the hospital started functioning in August 2006.
An X-ray machine worth Tk 1.99 crore has been lying idle in the radiology department since it was installed in 2006, Afzalur Rahman said. ‘We have written several letters to the vendor and it is yet to send any reply.’
The seven-bed incentive care unit in the hospital has also been lying idle for shortage of manpower for two months and a half, Md Afzalur Rahman said.
Many equipment were bought for nephrological treatment but the nephrology department has not been opened, the director said.
A mammography machine worth Tk 60 lakh has also remained inoperative since 2006. The supplier failed to run the
equipment used for breast-cancer screening.
A Jostra heart-lung machine worth about Tk 60 lakh and Jostra heart-exchanger for the cardiac surgery department and a Holter monitor worth Tk 8.75 lakh could not been run in six years for shortage of manpower.
The hospital authorities said that the ministry had earlier been notified about the manpower shortage in the hospital but nothing was done in this regard.