Post-devolution set-up: JPMC, NICVD, NICH want to be merged, says staff

Salaries haven’t been paid, repairs go untended, promotions are on hold.

KARACHI:

The staff of three of the city’s largest hospitals have once again renewed the demand to be merged and elevated to the status of a federal university instead of being run by the Sindh government.

The institutes, Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC), the National Institute of Child Health (NICH) and the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD), were previously managed by Islamabad. But with the passage of a new law giving provinces more powers, they were handed over to the provincial government. This prompted an outcry as their employees preferred to work for the federal government. Many of them saw devolution as a step down – not just in terms of pay and perks but also in terms of reputation and clout.

Their solution is for the three institutes to be merged. “This way at least we will not face the problem of the funding and training will be available to students from all over, instead of just Sindh,” argued Dr Shaukat Ali, the co-chairman of the steering committee they formed to unite on one platform. Indeed, the argument concerns a single important service of JPMC, NICVD and NICH – as federal tertiary-care teaching hospitals, they can accept students from across Pakistan. If they are managed by the Sindh government, the exclusionary rules of domicile come into play. With few teaching hospitals in the countryside, this could cut off many students from say, Sukkur. JPMC is the largest post-graduate training institute in the country, he added. It deserves the status of a university.

In the meantime, salaries are not paid on time as the Sindh government now manages the payroll. Some staff hasn’t been paid for as long as seven months. Part of the problem is that the entire mechanism of devolution went into action, but it threw the entire system into confusion, exacerbated by the fact that the provincial government simply didn’t have enough money to pay all new doctors, nurses and paramedics it inherited from the centre.

On Saturday, the committee met at JPMC’s Najmuddin auditorium, where these problems were aired. Dr Shaukat Ali said that 116 contract neurosurgery paramedics below grade 16 have not been paid for nearly half a year.

The staff is also loathe to accept the Sindh government pay structure, preferring the federal government’s. Sindh’s employees are under paid compared to the rest of the country even though the government has announced raises.

There were the smaller but urgent matters such as repairs and maintenance. The federal Public Works Department used to take care of JPMC, but now its electricity system, generators, lifts and water supply are largely untended.

In addition, there seems to be no clear-cut understanding or planning on promotions that keep getting postponed, the committee said. Ameer Hussain, the president of the paramedical staff at JPMC, said that their promotions have been at a standstill since devolution. “When we ask the provincial government, they say that the ministry does not have any funds to support the post-devolution set-up and is trying its best to make ends meet,” he said. All these constraints would be removed if the institutions were made part of the federal set-up again, he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd, 2012.