PIMS, Children Hospital overflowing with quake victims
By Adnan Rafique

ISLAMABAD—Surgeons and doctors are exhausted after working around the clock and 220 bedded Children’s Hospital in Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) is now treating more than 700, many with serious head, back and abdominal injuries.
The worst earthquake injured over 65,000 people, many of them children, a week later have overwhelmed Islamabad’s Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS).
Regular wards have overflowed and heavily bandaged, scarred and bruised boys and girls of all ages are lying on makeshift beds in lobbies, corridors, hallways and verandas.
Hundreds more children are being treated at smaller but similarly crowded facilities and temporary hospitals in Islamabad and at the Military Hospital in the adjoining Rawalpindi.
Professor Zaheer Abbassi, Head of pediatrics surgery at Pims, talking to inp said,” There are many, many problems. The operating theatres were not geared for treating hundreds of children in a short span of time.” He appealed for more doctors, surgeons and volunteers.
Most surgeons were working at least 15 hours a day, operating on up to 100-150 children daily and they and other staff had been getting virtually no sleep. “There is hardly any rest at all,” Abbassi said. “My doctors are sometimes doing 24-hour shifts and then they get just a few hours sleep and then they are up again for another 24 hours.”
Abbassi especially appealed for more volunteers, surgeons. “We are expecting more children over the next one or two weeks,” he said. “I think this seems to be only the tip of the iceberg.”