Volunteers cater to medical, other needs in hospitals

At SMHS Hospital here where thousands of people are spending uneasy days with their loved ones admitted for firearm and pellet injuries, volunteers are proving a great help.
From the moment an ambulance or a private vehicle arrives at the gate of the hospital, the volunteers swing into action. A human chain is formed to keep the crowd, media and onlookers at bay and facilitate free and easy way to Operation Theatre and Emergency area.

The volunteer presence is seen everywhere in hospital. “We have come up with a system. Volunteerism needs be organised in Kashmir,” Farooq Ahmed Lone, Founder of Help Poor Voluntary Trust.
The organisation has put volunteers on job to assess the needs of patients.
While some volunteers could be seen assisting attendants with blood and other diagnostic tests and facilitating payments and concessions, other ran from wards to medicine dispensing counters to make all drugs and disposable available free of cost at the hospital. “We have made it our policy right now that all the victims of firearm injuries get free medicines,” HPVT said.

Voluntary organisations had also kept transport vehicles in form of ambulances handy for transporting sick and injured to other hospitals and nearby places. “We would be travelling to outside Srinagar also,” the organisations said adding that the attacks on ambulances by men in uniform in the past few days had made it difficult to ply on highways.
At the hospital, various other voluntary organisations such as Athrout are also extending help to the needy. While food and refreshment stalls have been erected inside the hospital, many people come over with food and juice boxes and distribute to the admitted injured.
People are coming in hordes to donate, HPVT said. “We are sending people back now. We do not want them to donate what is not needed and will get wasted here,” Lone said. He urged that people should consult hospital authorities before making a donation. Ä lot of food was wasted here. That should not happen, said a volunteer.
The organisation has compiled a list of 200 people who had arrived for donating blood at the hospital. “We have very limited storage capacity and we have blood in this hospital,” HPVT said adding that the list was being kept handy. “We can call these volunteers anytime we need blood,” the organisation said.
Doctors at SMHS Hospital said that catering to the needs of injured would not have been possible without the help of voluntary organisations. “They managed the crowds, which could have made operating the injured impossible,” HPVT said.
The hospital authorities said that the support in terms of medicines, surgical disposables, other disposables and consumables extended by these organisations was exemplary.
“They did policing, nursing, catering and everything that was needed,” said a doctor at Emergency Theatre.