Deadline looms, but RIUT still awaits completion

Long-awaited project for treating urology, kidney diseases was to be made functional in December

RAWALPINDI:

The construction and development of Rawalpindi Institute of Urology and Kidney Transplant (RIUT), originally delayed for almost a decade and more recently slated to be completed by the end of this year, still awaits realisation. Despite an allocation of funds amounting to Rs1.23 billion for the health facility during the incumbent government’s tenure and the appointment of a project director, construction has been negligible and the hospital is yet to be made functional.

The incomplete public health facility has been operating as a treatment centre of coronavirus for the last two years and is now waiting to serve its primary purpose of functioning as a urology and kidney disease facility. The government has also released Rs80 million for the remaining civil work related to the project and Rs1.12 billion for the purchase of medical equipment, but funds required for issuing necessary tenders for the procurement could not be released, due to which progress on the development project is at a standstill. The partially built hospital is now expected to operate on a restricted scale and will run an emergency, OPD and dialysis unit in the first phase by next year.

The key health project is an urgent need of the hour in order to cater to the increasing number of patients inflicted with kidney diseases. Plans were finalised to recruit a 35-member medical expert team including eight urology consultants and 20 registered medical practitioners from the urology department of Benazir Bhutto Hospital with the aim to make the project functional this year. The proposal was made as a stopgap arrangement for the health facility until a qualified and expert team was recruited for RIUT.

After the onset of the corona epidemic, the progress of the project was slowed down. But the situation remains almost the same, even though the number of corona patients at the hospital has drastically reduced to only 15. Currently, there are 210 staff nurses at RIUT, while in order to make the institution fully functional, around 1,100 healthcare providers including doctors and staff nurses are needed. However, the process of recruitment is still pending. It may be recalled that in September 2012, the then Punjab Chief Minister Mian Shahbaz Sharif laid the foundation stone of RIUT.

The construction of the building and the completion of the civil work took a long time, and despite a lapse of almost a decade, work still remains. Additionally, RIUT had been converted into a dedicated healthcare facility for Covid-19 patients. With cases dropping drastically, the government decided to make the hospital functional immediately. In this regard, the process of installing equipment—which has been procured as per the hospital’s requirement—will be started soon. The hospital is planning to set up a 30-machine dialysis centre, with five state-of-the-art modular operating theatres and one more operating theatre to be set up where kidney transplant operations will be performed.

It should be noted that in the government’s current roadmap, the Rawalpindi Institute of Urology and Kidney Transplant is presently the only urology and kidney transplant institution in the Rawalpindi division. Due to the absence of a major urology hospital in the region, the immediate provision of dialysis and kidney transplant facilities in a large public hospital has become inevitable for patients who cannot afford private expenses. Health experts have urged the government to address the crucial issue so that the rising mortality rate due to the growing number of kidney diseases can be controlled.

It is to be noted that the institute has been under construction for the last nine years, and despite two upward revisions in the project costs from Rs3.2 billion to over Rs4 billion, the project could not even be partially completed within its final deadline of May 15, 2018.