Eye care: AJK to get its first eye hospital

Japan to give Rs8.2 million for equipment for the hospital.

Japan will give Rs8.2 million (US$97,989) to Al-Shifa Trust (AST) to strengthen eye services in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), said a press release issued by the Embassy of Japan on Thursday.

The agreement was signed between the Ambassador of Japan Hiroshi Oe and AST President Lt Gen (retd) Hamid Javaid at the ambassador’s residence on Thursday.

The grant would be used for the provision of medical equipment at the hospital.

Constructed over 6.25 acres, in Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Himalayan state, the 200-bed hospital will be the first facility of its kind in AJK.

The trust is currently running three state of the art hospitals in Rawalpindi, Kohat and Sukkur, while Muzaffarabad is the fourth district where the trust has built an eye hospital.

The hospital, which is the first of its kind, will be inaugurated by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on Saturday.

The hospital has the capacity to manage 800 patients and undertake 100 operations daily.

The hospital has been built at a cost of Rs250 million and has been designed to cater to the needs of the entire region.

It will also provide facilities for research and post-graduate training to doctors in future, besides serving as a base hospital for multiple vision centres in remote areas of AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan (G-B).

The ambassador said that ensuring primary health care services is one of the priorities in Japan’s assistance policy towards Pakistan.

He also expressed his hope that the project would help patients in improving and restoring their eyesight, which would raise their quality of life, besides strengthening relations between Pakistan and Japan.

With a population of over four million people and spread over 13,300 square kilometres, AJK did not have a single eye hospital until now. In addition to that, nearly 1.5 million people in G-B will also benefit from the hospital. With additional input from PPI.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 7^th, 2011.