Flood waters inundated ground floor wards at Mumbai’s KEM Hospital in Parel on Tuesday and forced employees to start relocating 30 patients, officials said. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation-run hospital is prone to flooding during the monsoon. Continuous heavy showers that lashed the state over the past 24 hours aggravated the overcrowding situation at the hospital.
While the administration said that they will shift the patients to the wards on higher-floors, the senior doctor told Scroll.in that all wards are already filled beyond capacity. “There is no place to shift these patients to other wards,” he said and added that operations scheduled for the afternoon had to be cancelled on account of the rain.
The situation in the hospital is likely to worsen, said another doctor. “They are trying to drain out the water from the wards but the whole hospital is surrounded with chest-deep water.”
Children admitted in the pediatric ward located on the ground floor were among the patients who had to be relocated. The Indian Metrological Department has warned that Mumbai will receive “heavy to very heavy rains” over the next few days.
Several patients who came to the hospital in the morning to seek treatment in the out-patient department are also stranded inside the hospital. “Nobody can step out of the hospital as the area is filled with water and the hospital is also getting flooded,” a doctor said.
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