LAHORE: The Mayo Hospital, the biggest health facility of the country, is experiencing a severe shortage of anaesthetists, as 26 posts of anaesthetists are vacant for quite a long time. Dearth of qualified professionals is effecting day-to day operations and elective surgeries being conducted at the hospital. Anaesthetists are very limited in number in several hospitals across Punjab. Untrained anaesthetists are administering anaesthesia to patients in several state-run hospitals, which is virtually endangering patients’ lives. Sources privy to this information told Daily Times that majority of skilled anaesthetists preferred to work at private hospitals where they earn more money as compared to the state-run hospitals, thus creating a vacuum of qualified anaesthetists at the public hospitals. Another reason of shortage of anaesthetists is lengthy procedure to fill the vacant seats, they said. Being the largest health facility in the country, they said, the hospital was battling hard to overcome shortage of doctors but still seven posts of senior registrar and 19 seats of anaesthesia consultants were vacant. With the passage of time, they said the hospital had established several surgery departments including department of cardiac surgery, neurosurgery, thoracic surgery, orthopaedic surgery and paediatric surgery to name a few but the number of anaesthetists were not increased to cater to ever growing number of surgeries being performed at the hospital. According to the hospital record, 22,371 operations were performed under local anaesthesia, 4,247 under spinal anaesthesia, 32,235 under local anaesthesia and 18,399 operations were performed under other types of anaesthesia in the last year. An anaesthetist at the hospital, wishing not to be named, said shortage of professional medics had put an extra burden on on-duty doctors. Even several machines at the department of anaesthesia have completed their life span, he added. Several attempts were made to know the stance of Mayo Hospital Medical Superintendent (MS) Dr Amjad Shahzad, but he did not respond.