DR. NIMAL SAMARASINGHE Courtesy The Island

MP Ven. Aturaliye Ratana Thera listening to mothers at the Kurunegala Teaching Hoispital who complained that they had not conceived since undergoing caesarean surgery by Dr. Seigu Shiyabdeen Mohammed Safi. Pic by Nishan S. Priyantha

The police have urged the public to inform the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) if they have any complaints against Dr. Seiugu Shafi for having carried out any illegal sterilization. This may open a can of worms with many startling news to emerge. Irrespective of whether these allegations against a single doctor can be proven or not, the Department of Health is thrust with an urgent need to act appropriately and methodically, to prevent such horrible consequences happening to unsuspecting innocent patients in the future. Rather than trying to put these allegations under the carpet, the department should take immediate steps to prevent such abuses by surgeons with warped minds.

It is paramount to investigate whether such inhuman acts are spread across the country, by doctors following the teachings of fundamentalist religious groups. On the one hand there are complaints of sterilizations on Sinhala Buddhist women without consent, and on the other hand quite the opposite on Muslim women who should have had sterilizations, but being signed off as done without actually performing the procedure on them.

The Department of Health should take immediate steps to encourage

whistleblowing among the surgical staff performing Obs and Gyn. surgery. The nurses, midwives and junior doctors should be given clear guidelines in this respect.

As these tubes can be rendered ineffective by simply applying pressure by instruments like artery forceps, on the sly, during any Obstetric or Gynaecological intra-abdominal procedure; a check list system has to be set in place after each procedure.

All the surgical nurses in the Obs and Gyn theatre should be trained how to check the fallopian tubes once the surgeon has finished one’s surgery. This is a simple technique, which can be carried out by trained hands. Therefore, after each procedure by a surgeon, irrespective of his identity, the status of the fallopian tubes should be checked before the closure, at least by two such trained senior surgical nurses in attendance in the theatre.

Until the nurses and junior doctors doing Surgical and Obs and Gyn placements are trained properly, the VOGs and the Surgeons should display the healthy fallopian tubes to the junior doctors and to the theatre head nurse after each procedure, before closing the abdomen. Desperate situations call for desperate measures, as this could be a wide spread conspiracy across the country.

Women should be offered the choice to undergo tests such as hysterosalpingogram to ascertain the patency of their fallopian tubes, after any abdominal procedure where doubt arises.

For the Health Minister to suggest that such abuse cannot be done as there are nurses, labourers and anaesthetists in the theatre, indicates he has no idea how a surgeon performs his work.

The Department of Health has a huge responsibility to address this issue forthwith, with utmost diligence, and to set in place definite plans to prevent such abuse by doctors misguided by religious extremism. In fact, such steps should be extended to cover all intra-abdominal operations on women.