The fire which hit a hospital in India on Friday and killed about 90 patients when its staff fled in panic should prompt Saudi health authorities to monitor hospitals and polyclinics across the Kingdom if they are prepared for such an emergency situation. The death toll from the fire at the AMRI Hospital in Kolkata, India, was high because its medical staff and other personnel left the patients when the blaze broke out at the seven-storey hospital instead of trying to find a way to move them to safer places. Reports said that the patients who died lost their lives not because they were burned but because of suffocation from smoke. This suggests that they could have been saved if the medical staff and other hospital personnel did not lose their presence of mind. Photographs dispatched by the news agencies to newspapers across the world showed rescue workers who came to the hospital later using ropes to lower the patients from the upper floors in a hurried evacuation. This suggests that either the hospital did not have adequate emergency exits or the emergency exits could not easily be used or found. From that experience, hospitals across the Kingdom should be monitored if they hold regular fire-preparedness drills for their medical staff and other personnel, if they have adequate firefighting equipment to put out the blaze as early as possible and if the emergency exits are always ready to be used in emergency cases. Hospital staff who are trained to handle emergency situations will know what to do to save patients when fire breaks out instead of panicking to save their own lives. Some could help put out the fire while others evacuate patients in an orderly manner. It goes without saying that personnel of hospitals and other health facilities should also be taught how to handle fire-fighting equipment so that fire could be extinguished as soon as possible. The authorities, of course, should see to it that hospitals and other health facilities must have enough firefighting equipment and emergency exits. Training the staff will come to naught if the basic requirements are not there. __
