Indus Hospital needs our help in K-P

You’ll be surprised to know that there’s a state-of-the-art hospital in Korangi, Karachi that has treated over two million patients, conducted over 50,000 surgeries, while charging its patients a grand total of zero rupees since 2007. If you don’t know about Indus Hospital already, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that the hospital isn’t just 100 per cent cashless but also paperless, while delivering quality care of the sort you’d receive at the likes of Aga Khan Hospital. If you ever wonder what makes an always-on-the-brink-of-disaster city like Karachi hold itself together, you should meet the invisible angels in the form of doctors at Indus Hospital quietly giving dignity and life to those that Karachi often forgets in its managed chaos: the poorest and most vulnerable in society.



“I saw people’s suffering first hand at Civil Hospital,” shares Dr Abdul Bari Khan, one of the silent angels who originally envisioned this hospital and current serves as its chief executive officer. After witnessing the suffering of patients post-twin bomb attacks in Karachi in 1986, Dr Bari and his friends at the student-run Patient Welfare Association decided to take matters in their own hands to renovate the otherwise ill-equipped casualty ward at Civil Hospital. This started a lifelong journey for Dr Bari to take on big health care challenges in the country and try to solve them by putting together a professional team that could work with both the government and private donors to help patients in need. While Dr Bari doesn’t like to talk about himself, a source close to him tells me that Dr Bari could easily have settled abroad and had a very nice life as an accomplished cardiac surgeon. Instead, he sacrificed his own life to help those in society who could never give him anything except prayers.



The K-P challenge

Indus Hospital has a vision to expand its outreach to patients in all four provinces. The purpose of this article is to highlight a challenge it is facing in setting up its hospital in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) and draw enough public awareness of the issue to overcome this challenge. The following story has been pieced together from conversations with sources close to Indus Hospital, correspondence between the hospital and the K-P government which I’ve personally seen as well as comments from PTI leadership.

The broad contours of the story are as follows: Imran Khan visited Indus Hospital in August 2013 and discussed the possibility of Dr Bari setting up a similar hospital in K-P on land donated by the government. This was followed by several meetings between the team at Indus Hospital and the highest levels of the K-P government, including more than one with the chief minister himself as well as a follow-up meeting with Imran Khan. While everyone assures Dr Bari of their support, after two years of meetings they still don’t have land to build the hospital. Meanwhile, the Punjab government has not only donated land but also gave Dr Bari a fully built and equipped hospital, along with a grant, to run in southern Punjab on the same cashless model. The Sindh government has also given Dr Bari Rs400 million in grants to help run the hospital in Karachi.

The other side of the story

To be fair, the K-P government hasn’t asked for any under the table deal and has engaged the Indus management in good conversations on public interest from the size of land to be allotted to modalities of a medical college that might also be established. K-P also originally wanted to donate land that had already been allotted to another hospital, which Indus pushed back on to avoid issues later. The bottom line is that there’s limited progress in K-P with meetings going in circles for two years on terms and conditions, while other provinces have moved ahead.



Dr Arif Alvi, a senior PTI leader I reached out to for comment assured me that they want to help Indus but the hospital was being a bit difficult in accepting their terms and conditions for a medical college nearby. Before their divorce, I also reached out to Reham Khan for comment on this story so we could directly bring it to Imran Khan’s attention. I’ve been told that Imran Khan has instructed that the hospital be facilitated as soon as possible and that everything will be done to help it. I believe the K-P government genuinely wants to help but needs a push in the right direction. We — the people — need to work together with game changers like Dr Bari and the PTI to support patients in need without sensationalising their cause (hopefully visible in the balanced tone of this article). I voted for Naya Pakistan myself in 2013 and believe that its incremental changes like these in our social contract with the state that will lead to bigger changes down the road.

Call to action

All of us — including you, the reader — need to raise the profile of this issue in conversations with your friends, colleagues and on social media to drive action. A simple tweet or status with ‘I support #IndusHospitalKPK’ will build the grass roots support for action here, which the hospital can then use to raise the priority of its case. To twist a famous Chinese proverb, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single hash-tag. All of us can’t save lives but we can give the silent angels in our society a voice!

Published in The Express Tribune, November 5^th, 2015.

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