Lady Willingdon’s fate takes a turn for the worse

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Gynaecology patients across the province are about to receive a blow as the Punjab government has started acting on the decision to shift the historic Lady Willingdon Hospital to a distant and much smaller place in Badami Bagh, Pakistan Today has learnt. Built in 1930 and affiliated since then with the country’s prime institution King Edward Medical University, Lady Willingdon Hospital is the province’s unique public health facility that specialises in gynaecology, the patients of which come from the far flung districts of Punjab. Situated on the Data Darbar Road before Minar-e-Pakistan, the 235-beds hospital is built on an area of 105 kanals, while a Revenue Department certificate revealed that it is actually 131 kanals, as shown by the measurements that were taken a couple of years ago. However, the Punjab government had decided to relocate the hospital to a 32-kanal plot where stores of Food Department were previously present and were demolished a few years back.
The newly-selected place faces the back side of a bus stand in Badami Bagh with a series of small houses built along the other two sides. Moreover, it is a low lying area always prone to accumulating water, which is why the godowns were demolished in the first place.
Sources privy to the development revealed that a master plan of the provincial metropolitan approved during General Ghulam Jilani’s regime envisioned a park on the area with a dental hospital and Lady Willingdon Hospital and the incumbent government was following the same plan.
The government has already started constructing the Fatima Institute of dental sciences far from the city in Jubilee Town while an almost inaccessible land has been selected to house the historic Lady Willingdon Hospital.
Sources further said that Health Secretary Jehanzaib Khan along with Gangaram Hospital MS Dr Aijaz Sheikh and Building Department Superintendent Engineer Sabir Khan had visited the new site on November 24 and had done fresh measurement of the land and ordered boring to determine the level of underground water. They further said the government had also sought proposal for a 350 bed hospital from the hospital administration.
Lady Willingdon Hospital MS Dr M Afzal however denied having received any official notification in this regard. “I have neither attended any official meeting on relocating the hospital nor have I received any official circular in this regard,” Afzal said. To a question he said most of the patients coming to the hospital belonged to poor families, as evident from the fact that most of the 16 private rooms available in the hospital remained vacant most of the time as nobody could afford them. No other facility at this level is available across the province, especially because of its affiliation with the prestigious KEMU, he added.
A female doctor however said the plan of relocating the hospital from the established place to a smaller building was “ridiculous” and “unjust” for the poor. “The doctors will keep working even if it is a small or a big place, patients will suffer actually….this hospital should be expanded instead of relocating it to a small and inaccessible area because patients have known the location of the hospital for decades,” she added.

1 COMMENT

  1. Shifting of this hospital will no doubt a crazy decision. the building and hospital and standing at present place since 1930 and its heritage of lahore. The health facilities in the city are already very rare particulary for the poor people and instead of buidling new hospital why the punjabe governemnt is wasting public money in the shifting of the hospital. if they really want a garden in the area than they should first demolish the encroachments by powerful Qabza Mafia along the circular garden.

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