Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital
“On Alert for More Quake Victims”
Today Robert Siegel, producer Art Silverman and Xiaoyu Xie, an NPR listener who is helping us out as translator and our guide to Chengdu, checked out relief efforts in the city itself. I tagged along.
At the Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital, we were met initially with suspicion about who we were and what we were up to. But concern soon gave way to an openness you probably wouldn't find in most American hospitals. We were allowed into the ER. It was chaotic.
The nursing staff at Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital at the entrance.
Photo by Art Silverman, NPREvery few minutes ambulances arrived with victims. They were met by a veritable army of nurses and student nurses--20 at one point lined up by the door, white face masks on, blue stretchers at the ready. Those most seriously injured were rushed through a door marked "Red Sector." Others were examined right in the entrance hall to the ER; a room crammed with patients, families, medical personnel, volunteers wearing bright red sashes, as well as a few journalists like us.
A SWIRLING MAELSTROM
As we interviewed the head of the Emergency Medicine, Dr. Hu Weijian, a woman lay on a gurney in the middle of the room, covered with a grimy comforter. Her arms were badly scratched and bruised and her right leg broken. As the maelstrom swirled around her, the patient was examined, X-rays consulted, and then a flurry of people in white coats wrapped her leg in an old-fashioned plaster cast. We talked to her husband, who enthusiastically praised the government's response to the quake. Military relief workers had pulled his wife from the rubble in one of the hard-hit towns north of Chengdu.
Dr. Hu, the ER chief, told us the hospital had 550 patients and could take another hundred. He said he needed more experienced doctors, those specializing in external medicine--the treatment of broken limbs and so on. Outside the hospital, makeshift wards made of plywood and cheap tarpaulins, designed to handle any overflow of the injured, sat empty, at least for now.
--Chris Turpin
12:00 PM ET | 05-14-2008 | permalink
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