PHC stops action against senior AMI doctors

Petitioners say withdrawing rules from the institute would open Pandora’s box

ABBOTTABAD: The Abbottabad registry of the Peshawar High Court (PHC) has stopped the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa health department and the Board of Governors of the Ayub Medical Institute (AMI) from taking any action against a group of senior doctors at the facility.

The stay was awarded by a two-member bench of the PHC including Justice Lal Jan Khattak and Justice Arshad Ali Shah which heard a petition filed by seven senior doctors including the head of Community Medicine at AMI Professor Dr Salim Wazir.

The writ petition had challenged a letter written by the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) Health Department to the AMI board of governors stating that Efficiency and Discipline rules were not applicable to employees of AMI since it was either an autonomous or a semi-autonomous institution.

The letter, signed by Health Deputy Secretary Tariq Khan and dated November 30, had been dispatched to AMI. It, however, failed to elaborate which rules were relevant.

The petitioners argued that by not applying these rules would present a recipe for disaster and will open a Pandora’s box since all medical teaching institutions in the province had adopted these rules, settling a number of cases according to them.

The letter was in context to directions issued by the AMI board to implement the decision of an inquiry conducted by the Provincial Inspection Team in 2014 on the purchase of equipment for the Gynae and Paediatrics ward at the AMI.

The BoG had proceeded against 20 employees under the government’s E&D Rules of 2011 by holding formal inquiries and appointing a three-member committee of senior professors as per the rules.

Documents available with The Express Tribune show after the enactment of the Medical Teaching Institutions (MTI) Act 2015, the AMI had in June 2015 adopted the K-P E&D Rules 2011 and Service Rules since these rules were absent in the MTI Regulations.

All of these processes had been directed by the former BoG Chairman Rashid Ahmad, a former secretary of the K-P Establishment and Administration Department.

Subsequently, the inquiry committee recorded the statements of the accused and collected other evidence, submitting a report in January 2016. The reports were then deliberated on by the BoG in March 2016.

Curiously, the health department had written to AMI just days before its board meetings asking it to reopen the inquiries. The letters were written on November 1, 2017, and on November 30, 2017.

Earlier this year, the K-P health department had replaced the former chairman of AMI Javed Panni with Major General (Retd) Dr Asif Ali Khan.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 15^th, 2017.