Civil Hospital’s cath lab in dire need of healing

A proposal has now been sent to health department to set up a new facility

LUCKNOW: The catheterisation laboratory (cath lab) at the Civil Hospital in the state capital is defunct and patients in need of angiography, or a pacemaker, have to look to other options. The hospital was the first among government hospitals in the district to set up a cath lab.

The cath lab has lain dysfunctional the last four years for want of new equipment, while the TMT (treadmill test) or the cardiac stress test machine that helps determine how far a patient’s heart can go before an abnormal rhythm or abnormal blood flow to the heart is detected, has not been functioning for the past two years.

“We have sent a proposal to the health department to get a new cath lab established so that heart patients can be catered to,” said Dr Anand Ojha, director of the Civil or Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Hospital that gets over 2,000 patients daily, including a large number of heart patients.

After it was established in 2008, the cath lab conducted 298 angiographies and carried out the procedure for 17 permanent and 21 temporary pacemakers till 2018.

In early 2018, problems started, and in March 2018, the firm that had installed the cath lab told the hospital administration that parts of this equipment are not available now, as the model is very old.

The hospital has three cardiologists and if a patient needs a procedure to be done in a cath lab, they are referred to other centres such as PGI, King George’s Medical University or Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Institute of Medical Sciences. Some go to these centres that already have a long queue in the OPD but many fail to and land up in private hospitals.

The hospital’s proposal sent to the health department is said to value around Rs 4 crore.