Senate panel irked over shortage of facilities at PIMS

CDWP has approved Rs2 billion for setting up cancer hospital in the city at NIH

ISLAMABAD: A parliamentary committee has expressed concerns over the shortage of facilities at one of the biggest tertiary care hospitals of the federal capital. It is especially disconcerting since this hospital has a load of patients coming in from across the country.

The senators, at a meeting of Senate Standing Committee on Capital Administration and Development Division (CADD), said there is an urgent need to improve the facilities at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) since patients suffering from various diseases come to the hospital for treatment. The committee members made recommendations to provide funds so that new initiatives can be taken to manage the patient load.

Pims Executive Director Dr Amjad Mehmood said PC-I for liver transplant has been approved but due to shortage of funds the work has been stopped. He also said there is no specialist available for liver transplants because no specialist wants to join the hospital on the kind of meagre salary the hospital is offering, while market rates are higher than the government salary structures. He informed that the hospital has written a letter to CADD to allocate Rs96 million so that specialised transplant surgeons can be hired on a contract basis for surgeries.

The committee members also inquired about the stolen machines for liver transplant from gastroenterology department in 2014.

It was informed that the matter is being investigated by Federal Investigation Agency (FIA). The committee called the FIA officials investigating the issue in the next meeting.

The senators were also informed that about 1,149 posts of various grades of the hospital are vacant making it difficult to take on the current patient load and of them 642 have been advertised. The executive director said things will improve once new staff is hired by the FPSC.

In his briefing, Dr Mehmood said that around 1.2 million patients had been checked at Pims during the years 2017-18. He informed the committee that Pims did not have a fully-functioning oncology department at the hospital; adding only one doctor of the said department was available.

Moreover, during the briefing the Committee was told that Central Development Working Party (CDWP) had approved Rs2 billion for the establishment of a cancer hospital in Islamabad. The Cancer Hospital Islamabad was project of Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Medical University. The committee suggested the cancer hospital should be established at National Institute of Health (NIH) Hospital as it has enough land.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 14^th, 2018.