Deaths at sterilisation camps: Safety in focus

The death of four women after undergoing surgeries at Community Health Centre (CHC) in Ibrahimpatnam has highlighted the difficulties in organising sterilisation camps.

Hyderabad: The death of four women after undergoing surgeries at Community Health Centre (CHC) in Ibrahimpatnam has highlighted the difficulties in organising sterilisation camps. It is a known fact that holding sterilisation camps is a common strategy for public health departments to counter the lack of qualified doctors and healthcare facilities in villages.

Such camps are held on designated days in small towns, and women from nearby villages are recruited through the local network of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA). In fact, between April and July this year, the local health authorities in the State organised a total of 111 sterilisation camps and conducted 38, 656 surgeries.

“This is for the first time that such an incident has taken place. Since 2016, there are no targets for the health department and such surgeries are conducted only when public volunteer to get it done. In 2020-21, a total of 1.20 lakh such operations were conducted. In fact, the medical team that conducted the surgeries is also highly experienced,” Director of Public Health (DPH) Dr G Srinivasa Rao, on Tuesday, said.

A couple of major factors might have led to the fatalities, senior doctors familiar with such sterilisation camps point out. The Standards and Quality Assurance in Sterilisation Services of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW), prohibits one doctor from sterilising more than 30 women in a day and only three laparoscopes have to be used to sterilise up to 30 women.

Another cause could be the poor quality of surgeries done in unsafe and unhygienic conditions leading to adverse outcomes. The tendency among surgeons to outdo each other, in terms of number of sterilisations performed, quite often also becomes a major research.

“We still have to wait for a few more days to find the exact cause of death of the four women. We are constantly upgrading the capacity of workers and ensuring that such camps are conducted by strictly following MOHFW sterilisation guidelines,” Dr Rao maintained.