K-P’s lone regional blood centre shuts down

Officials say they will regularise staff at these centres soon

PESHAWAR: A regional blood centre (RBC) in Peshawar has been closed for the past eight days after contracts of the staff employed there expired.

After operating for five years, contracts of the staff working in the project ended on June 30. While all the machinery and equipment remains in place at the facility in working order, the facility has been shut ever since.



The RBC in Peshawar was among the state-of-the-art facility which were set up across the country with assistance from Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), a German bank, at a cost of Rs190 million.

While the RBC had been handed over to the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) government and has facilitated 6,000 patients with blood components since the beginning of the year, contracts of the staff were not renewed on July 1.

Officials stated that the facility was operating under the provincial directorate general for health, adding that the staff were assured that they would be regularised.

“Yes, the centre has been closed since July 1 since the staff was uncertain about their status,” Dr Tahir Khan, project director for Peshawar’s facility, confirmed.

“The staff was assured early in the morning to carry on since the government wanted to regularise the RBC staff,” he added.

“The project ran on the developmental side but has now been running on the regular side and the budget has also been approved,” Khan further told The Express Tribune, adding, “I have received calls from the health department to assure the employees will be regularised.”

Officials said that a second phase of the project, worth Rs385 million, had also been approved which would see similar centres built in Abbottabad, Dera Ismail Khan and Swat to supply blood components to hospitals in these three districts.



They stated that the Central Development Working Party (CDWP) had approved the project whose cost would be shared between the German and K-P government. The project would cost a total of Rs676 million to build the three projects of which Rs385 million would be provided by a grant from the German government while the K-P government would put up the remaining Rs290 million.

Each of these three new centres, expected to start working soon, will produce an estimated 20,000 bags of blood components for around 60,000 patients, per year.

The facilities can separate red blood cells, platelets and plasma from blood. It provides fresh frozen plasma on demand to hospitals. Moreover, it can conduct around 480 different blood tests including those for Hepatitis B, C and HIV within 90 minutes.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 8^th, 2017.