Medical city proposed for Rawalpindi

RMU VC says any delays in starting construction of project could jeopardise it

RAWALPINDI: With overcrowding witnessed by Prime Minister Imran Khan in a recent visit of hospitals of the garrison city, the government is planning to build an Rs100 billion medical city to meet current and future patient and health needs of the city and the region.

The plan, confirmed by a senior health official of the city, was created because hospitals in the city are facing a massive influx of patients from surrounding areas.

According to documents of the medical city, it will be built on land adjacent to the Grand Trunk (GT) Road and Rawat on the edge of Rawalpindi over 10,000 acres of land. A dedicated authority will be set up to manage the entire city.

Apart from medical facilities, the project will also include a network of modern health and medicine research centres for better healthcare and health education.

Once built, the project will also include a self-contained rail network which will make it easy for patients and visitors to move between different departments and centres in the medical city.

Rawalpindi Medical University (RMU) Vice Chancellor Professor Dr Muhammad Umar, who worked on creating the medical city model and its initial feasibility, said that the number of patients seeking treatment at the three allied public hospitals of Rawalpindi has increased in recent years.

With health facilities in Attock, Jhelum, Chakwal and other tehsils of Rawalpindi, including their district headquarters (DHQ) hospitals and primary healthcare centres, ignored in over the years, there has been a drastic rise in the number of patients arriving at the three allied hospitals of the city seeking treatment,” Dr Umar said, noting that this not only poses great problems for patients but also for the hospital administrators.

He added that the three allied hospitals in Rawalpindi including the Holy Family Hospital (HFH), the Benazir Bhutto Hospital (BBH) and the DHQ, do not have any capacity for further expansion to accommodate the rising number of patients.

The medical city would, for the foreseeable future, help tackle the patient load from within the Rawalpindi division and neighbouring regions such as Islamabad, Parts of northern Punjab, Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P).

Published in The Express Tribune, January 11^th, 2019.