CHARSADDA: Sudais Medical Centre presents a ray of hope for the hearing-impaired children in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as such children are being operated upon successfully with cochlear implant surgery and now they can live a normal life with all the abilities of hearing and speaking.
Talking to media persons at the SMC, chief executive officer (CEO) Asmatullah Asar said that cochlear implants were not only the most advanced but also the most expensive treatment for deaf and dumb kids.
Surgery of one child could cost Rs2.5 million which was beyond the reach of poor people, he said.
He said the hospital administration had inked an MoU with Baitul Maal for the provision of funds to poor patients for implants. He said renowned surgeon Dr Maqbool Baloch had performed successful surgeries on about 34 speech and hearing-impaired children so far in this hospital.
It merits mention here that there are two such hospitals in Khyber Pakhtunkhwaone is in Charsadda and the other in Saidu Sharif, Swat which has the facilities to perform cochlear implants and most of the operations are successful in children aged between three to five years.
Children with this illness are being brought to the medical center at Charsadda from across the country.
The medics in the hospital told media persons that the surgery takes four hours, after which the children are put under observation for 24 hours in the hospital and then they are shifted home. Later therapy is started in which the parents play an important role, and after a year with their full attention, the child becomes able to return to school in a normal position.
Surgeon Dr. Maqbool Ahmed Baloch told local media persons that this cochlear implanting facility was available in most hospitals of Punjab and Sindh, but unfortunately, the hospitals in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan had no such facilities.
He said that no successive governments allocated any funds for this purpose. He stressed the need to include cochlear implant surgery in a government-sponsored health card scheme.
On this occasion, Bahadur Khan of Katlang, Mardan, Shahbaz Khan of Bajaur, Janus Khan of Kaladhir, Charsadda, and others told media persons that they had brought their speech and hearing impaired children to Sudais Medical Center Charsadda for treatment and their surgeries were successful. Faiz Muhammad
