Teaching hospitals: Doctors unhappy with new governing boards

Say stakeholders have been excluded from decision-making entity

PESHAWAR: For the past several months, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government’s health department has been on the path to reformation. This has not gone down well with practitioners.

As soon as the names of governing board members for the province’s four major teaching hospitals were announced on Wednesday, doctors rejected the decision and voiced concerns.

Bureaucrats, retired servicemen, senior surgeons, educationists, social workers, accountants and bankers are part of the decision-making groups that will govern Lady Reading Hospital, Khyber Teaching Hospital, Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC) and Ayub Medical Complex. The decision was made under the Medical Teaching Institutions Reforms Act 2015.

Without experts

Doctors said newly-formed BoGs do not include stakeholders; instead the boards comprise people who have little or no connection with on-ground realities. Talking to The Express Tribune, a doctor said, “The government has been treating K-P’s health professionals as lab rats. If the experiments continue, the entire system will collapse.”

Another senior medical professional, requesting anonymity, said, “It is the doctors who deal with patients every day and not health department officials. He added those who have a better understanding of the problems encountered by people at K-P’s major health facilities have been sidelined by the government. “It is beyond my understanding why stakeholders have not been taken on board,” he said.

Medical staffers are already up in arms over several reforms implemented without taking their concerns into consideration, another doctor wishing to remain unnamed told The Express Tribune.

“Several BoG members of Lady Reading Hospital do not even live in K-P,” he said, questioning how someone sitting hundreds of miles away can possibly set the house in order.

Provincial Doctors Association HMC President Dr Qazi Amjad rubbished the formation of BoGs. “We were assured on numerous occasions that our suggestions will be incorporated but it was all lip service,” he said. Amjad was of the view the K-P government has blindly copied Western models without looking at the on-ground realities.

The K-P DG and secretary health both could not be reached for a comment despite multiple attempts.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 8^th, 2015.