Only four hospitals in KP have nursery wards.

Byline: Ashfaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR -- All the districts, except Peshawar and Abbottabad, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa don't have nursery wards in public sector health facilities to provide specialised treatment to the newborn babies during the first 28 days of their birth and control avoidable mortalities.

The paediatricians say that nursery wards exist in three hospitals in Peshawar and one health facility in Abbottabad that receive patients from the whole province. The newborns were prone to many illnesses due to their weak immunity level and required health services in the nearest hospitals in native areas, they added.

In Peshawar, the three medical teaching institutions on average admit three patients on the same bed in nursery wards for lack of space and increasing number of referred patients.

The health experts told this scribe that Lady Reading Hospital had a 40 bed-nursery ward for neonates, Khyber Teaching Hospital had 35-bed ward and Hayatabad Medical Complex had 20 beds for newborns on which children triple to their capacities were admitted.

Experts say newborns need health services in their native areas

They said that common health issues among neonates were prematurity, low birth weight and perinatal asphyxia (oxygen deficiency at birth) that were manageable through infrastructure and trained and well-equipped health workers. In Pakistan, about 54 of 1,000 neonates died per day and half of them expired for want of treatment, they added.

A member of the provincial chapter of Pakistan Paediatrics Association said that the province required nursery wards at district and tehsil level to bring down mortalities because many children died while being transported to Peshawar. 'Private maternity homes should have been asked to establish nursery wards to manage newborns,' he said.

Dr Vikram Kumar, a junior consultant neontologist at Indus Hospital Karachi, said that they were undertaking a study to ascertain the presence of human resources, equipment, beds and medical staff in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on the pattern of Balochistan where they conducted a detailed survey during April-June 2020.

'Our main aim...