Ventilator bank saves Nepalese

HOSPITALS: ‘CHRONICALLY, INSUFFICIENTLY EQUIPPED’

Health facilities, especially in rural areas, rent machines.

Aventilator “bank”, where hospitals can rent critical care machines for Covid-19 patients, has given Nepal’s cash-strapped healthcare system a much-needed lifeline.

The Himalayan nation experienced a spike in infections in April and May, with hospitals overwhelmed and medical supplies running low.

As the infectious disease started to spread across the impoverished nation a year ago, Nepal only had 840 ventilators for a population of nearly 30 million, according to government data.

Most of the ventilators – needed to help severely ill Covid-19 patients breathe – were in the capital Kathmandu, leaving regional and rural hospitals vulnerable.

While daily infections have since declined from a peak of more than 9 000 cases in mid May, authorities say hospitals remain under pressure.

But Nepal Ventilator Services, a nonprofit organisation that has bought 85 of the machines through donations since the start of the pandemic last year, has helped to meet the surge in demand.

“Nepal is chronically, insufficiently equipped with machines like ventilators,” the group’s cofounder, 42-year-old Dr Bishal Dhakal, said. “It does not have even required numbers, about 2 000 to 3 000 machines for a 30-million population.”

The heart surgeon reached out to donors for funding in April last year and money poured in, allowing the organisation to buy 20 ventilators to rent out to hospitals at cost.

Bhim Hospital in the country’s south, which had one ventilator, loaned two from Dhakal’s group in August for three months.

“Our patients needed ventilators but we did not have enough budget to immediately buy any,” the government hospital’s medical superintendent, Shakuntala Gupta, said.

“The bureaucratic process for an approval is also long.”

Since then, the ventilators have been used for nearly 1 500 patients across the country. Karuna Hospital in Kathmandu, which has been renting eight ventilators since April this year, said the “bank” was life-saving.

“At the peak, almost every patient who was admitted in the ICU required ventilator support,” the private hospital’s chief executive, Ram Kumar Shrestha, said.

“If the ventilator ‘bank’ did not exist, the death rate would perhaps be beyond our imagination, not just here but in many places across Nepal.”

Dhakal said all the organisation’s 85 ventilators were loaned out during the peak.

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If the ventilator ‘bank’ did not exist, the death rate would perhaps be beyond our imagination.

Ram Kumar Shrestha Hospital CEO