ABSTRACT
Background: Hospital admission data can be a valuable tool for assessing the epidemiology of diseases within populations. With a minimum amount of data collection, substantial insight can be had into the types of diseases, the age at which conditions present, and their burden on inpatient service. And although these data are inevitably referral and access biased, they can provide useful information on morbidity in the community. Little is known about the surgical and medical diseases burden in tertiary care hospitals in Pakistan. Incomplete information has made it difficult to define an appropriate role for tertiary health care hospitals and the objectives of this research is to determine the referral profile of patients who are attending medical and allied OPD in Jinnah Hospital Lahore and compare disease burden from local and peripheral areas in surgical and medical units of Jinnah Hospital Lahore
Methods: Cross sectional study in medical and surgical wards of Jinnah Hospital, Lahore
Results: In our study, it was found that public Tertiary Care Hospitals, such as Jinnah Hospital Lahore, has much more patients referred to it from rural cities compared to urban population with a referral burden of 63.01% subjects from rural areas or outside city versus 36.99% subjects belonging from urban areas or within city. Many of these patients, 35.6%, obtaining this facility equipped with all modalities in single setting belonged to poor socio economic status. 72.6% had a total family income of < Rs.20, 000/- per month. And the interesting fact causing the demise of Health Care Facility system is that 72% of the subjects were self-referred without any referral profile and diverting burden of Primary and Secondary Health Care facilities on the Tertiary Health Care setup
Conclusion: The disease burden from peripheral/rural areas is far greater than local/urban areas in surgical and medical units of Jinnah Hospital Lahore, and the most of the subjects are self-referred
ABSTRACT
Background: In Pakistan, the bacteriological quality of drinking water is not closely monitored and prevalence of waterborne diseases due to the contamination of drinking water is among the most common problems faced in urban and rural areas of Pakistan. The bacteria inhabiting these water sources carry genes which render them resistant to many antimicrobials. These genes can be transmitted to other non-resistant bacteria as well making the diseases caused by them hard to treat
Objective: To test the isolated bacteria from collected drinking water samples for their antibiotic susceptibility profile for 14 commonly used antimicrobials
Methods: The study involves collection of 100 samples of drinking water from four water sources, namely boring water, tap water, filtered water and boiled water, randomly collected from different parts of Karachi using a sterile method. They were tested to determine the bacterial isolates present in them using the analytical profile indexing [API]. The antimicrobial susceptibility profile of these bacteria was done using the Kirby Bauer disk diffusion method
Results: It was estimated that Klebsiella is the most commonly found organism in the drinking water samples, followed by Pseudomonas and E.Coli, Staphylococcus Aureus being the least common. The isolates were found to be most resistant to Ampicillin [99%] and least resistant to Amikacin [1%] while they were found to be most sensitive to Amikacin [96%] and Imipenem [96%]
Conclusion: Better quality and standards of drinking water are necessary for healthy human life. Filtration and boiling of tap and boring water decreases the number of pathogens present in it making it better and healthier for human consumption