Critical care: Jinnah Hospital seeks extra funding for two new units

‘Units built with help from donors need dedicated staff’.

LAHORE:

Jinnah Hospital is short of funds to run two intensive care units set up recently with the help of donations and has asked the government to hire staff and buy medicines, The Express Tribune has learnt.

Allama Iqbal Medical College Principal Professor Mahmood Shaukat wrote to the Health Department on August 30, 2012, asking that it hire staff for the Bu Ali Sina/Dengue ICU, according to documents available with The Express Tribune. Prof Shaukat’s predecessor Dr Javed Akram had also written to the department seeking staff for the unit, which began operations in November 2011. Hospital officials said that both requests had been denied.

The principal had said the ICU needed an associate professor in BPS-19, seven medical officers, 20 staff nurses, one key punch operator, three dispensers, two naib qasids, four female ward helpers and six sweepers.

The five-bed unit, set up at a cost of some Rs50 million, was largely funded by a group of donors named Friends of Jinnah. The unit is equipped to provide specialist treatment for dengue patients, and other critical care patients in times when dengue is not prevalent. The equipment at the unit includes ventilators, cardiac monitors, beds, pulse oximeters, a central oxygen supply system and a monitoring system.

A doctor associated with the project said that the Health Department had rejected the request to hire more staff and directed the administration to use existing staff. “Doctors have been volunteering in their free time to serve at the unit but it’s becoming more and more difficult to manage this,” he said.

He added that the extra staff would cost about Rs40 million a year in salaries. “The donors paid for medicines and equipment. They cannot pay for the staff as well,” he said.

The 12-bed Umar Critical Care Unit was funded by a single anonymous donor and inaugurated by Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif in May. It has a dialysis unit, a monitoring system, ventilators and steel walls, said Rauf Malik, the manager of the unit. He said that the chief minister had pledged at the inauguration that the government would provide staff, but this had not happened.

Prof Shaukat told The Tribune that he was hopeful that the government would agree to release extra funds for running the Umar CCU. “The Health Department has forwarded the expenditures list to the Finance Department for approval,” he said. He added that the request for staff to be hired for the Dengue ICU had been rejected.

A senior Health Department official said that it would “take some time” for funding for the Umar CCU to be approved.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 26^th, 2012.