Private labs asked to follow regime
Waste flows into a pond from several pipelines. Photo: Express
The Islamabad Healthcare Regulatory Authority (IHRA) has warned private laboratories to face the music for not adopting regulations for the safe disposal of hospital waste.
According to an official of the authority, action will be taken against those laboratories in the federal capital which were not following proper procedures for disposal of waste right from handling, collecting, transporting, discarding, and marking till incineration to avoid minimal exposure to others. "Infectious waste produced at the labs and hospitals is a great threat to the public health and the environment and causes nosocomial infections if waste is not managed well," he said.
He said that the Authority had also started a crackdown on private COVID-19 testing laboratories in the federal capital for issuing fake results of the infection tests with the support of travel agents. He said, these laboratories are unlawfully giving wrong PCR test reports of Coronavirus as per the desire of the people with the involvement of some travel agents. He said that it was also observed that some labs had issued COVID-19 reports without receiving nasal or oral swab samples or even issued negative reports to the positive patients to make their travelling easier with having wrong dealings with travel agents. The official said, we will not allow anyone to run any such illegal business in the medical field.
Read: ‘Dumping site selected for disposal of capital’s waste’
“They are playing with the health of people while deceiving health authorities. The IHRA inspections teams had started surprise visits to all such labs and their collection points. The Authority had suspended the services of three laboratories while further were under observation. We have started collecting data to take action and seal all such labs with the support of the local administration as we are against this unlawful practice and our policy is zero-tolerance against such illegal activity."
He said, we are ready to perform our role of policing for legal health establishments also to protect citizens from wrongdoings of the health setups as we have been given mandate with the power to ask from these setups about any illegality with citizens. The Authority has field teams who monitor the standards of health facilities in the federal capital besides completing routine assessments, he said and added that the main objective of IHRA was to regulate healthcare services and establishments in the federal capital.
The official said that to regulate these health establishments, the Authority was working on standards and after completing its documentation work on these standards, health establishments will be examined to know whether these standards were being observed or not. He said these steps aimed at ensuring that formal or informal and public or private healthcare services to the citizens of the federal capital were at par with the international standards to further internationally recognize these services also. He added after observing these standards, the license will be issued to the eligible setups to operate in the federal capital while the authority will not allow working all substandard setups.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 28th, 2022.