KUWAIT CITY, March 20, (KUNA): The national health campaign, ‘365 Days, Kuwait Without Pain’, the first of its kind in the country, will kick off in April, said Director of the Anesthetics and ICU Department at Adan Hospital Dr Mohammad Shamsah on Saturday.
In a statement to KUNA, Shamsah said that the aim of the campaign was to make Kuwaiti hospitals free of pain and to provide all necessary means of comfort for any patient living on Kuwaiti soil.
He also noted that health care systems all over the world stressed the importance of such health care issues, noting that this was stated by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), namely the right of every human being to be treated from pain and to live without pain.
Plan
The first step of this project began with devising an overall and integrated plan for all hospitals, especially the anesthetics departments in order to set the service mechanism and to choose a nurse from every hospital to be trained on this matter, along with training the whole nursing staff in general, Shamsah said.
He went on to explain that the working group would deliver some piloting lectures at strategic state bodies in order to highlight the side effects of pain, whether acute — resulting from surgeries and traffic accidents — or chronic — like the cancer or back pain.
Dr Shamsah asserted that the working group would make people acquainted, in a simple way, with the methods of overcoming pain, especially pregnant women who deemed childbirth a painful experience.
He added that the group’s activities would cover all patients of hospitals as they would include pamphlets in Arabic and English with some illustrations distributed to patients once they were admitted to the hospital. These pamphlets talk about the methods of overcoming pain, along with explaining the steps taken by the doctor to convey such methods to patients.
These pain-easing methods depend on cutting-edge technologies that include elders and children alike, Shamsah said, asserting that children had priority when it came to easing pain, even if it were a mere sting of a syringe.
He said that anesthetic methods could be used to treat cancer pain and chronic back pain.
Finally, Dr Shamsah asserted that rendering this project successful was not only dependent on the medical staff consisting of anesthetic, ICU, emergency doctors along with the nursing staff, but it also had to do with cooperation from the public and the interest in sharing their views with the medical staff.
Water
Meanwhile, in an unrelated development, results of a study conducted by the Ministry of Health (MoH) during academic year 2009/2010 showed the poor quality of drinking water in several schools throughout the country, reports Awan daily quoting sources from the ministry.
After examining 357 samples out of 1,052 taken from 525 public and private schools in various governorates, the ministry discovered that 33.9 percent of drinking water in these schools is not fit for human consumption, while 66.1 percent is drinkable.  Schools in Hawally and Capital governorates recorded the highest percentage of poor quality drinking water.  Out of 252 samples taken from 126 schools in Hawally, 106 are undrinkable, the study revealed.
On the other hand, the schools in Jahra Governorate recorded the least percentage of undrinkable water as only 22 samples out of 62 taken from 31 schools are not fit for human consumption, the study added.
Sources confirmed the ministry will forward results of the study to its education counterpart and the educational zones to address the problem as soon as possible.  Sources said the ministry intends to conduct similar tests on samples of drinking water and filters in different schools regularly to protect the health of students.