The outgoing elected government is spending billions to desperately make its so-called development projects visible on the eve of general elections but the public interest issues are badly ignored by the elected representatives.
Public sector health institutions which, to the sheer disadvantage of the helpless masses, are overcrowded for the reason none other than inadequate number of public health facilities especially in the rural Sindh and least developed province of Baluchistan.
The deep-rooted menace of corruption and favoritism is always there to multiply the sufferings of patients with chronic diseases. If you feel suffering from some sort of heart-related disease, its diagnosis will take you weeks at the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICD).
The first thing the doctors tend to prescribe to a patient of cardio disorder is echocardiography, best known to the patients and their visibly perturbed attendants as Echo.
Though the doctors inside the laboratory at NICD’s department of echocardiography (DoE) tend to do disease-wise categorisation, the receptionist at the DoE gives one-to-three-week time to the patients referred to him with a prescription for Echo.
Mumtaz is the only person who has to deal with, what he told Pakistan Today, at least 90 to 100 patients during the short span of seven hours, 8am to 3pm, daily. This number, Dr Habiba Tasneem, in charge of the DoE, said excluded those referred as emergency case or those already under treatment in the hospital’s wards.
As this reporter witnessed it, generally the patients were asked to come back for getting the Echo done after 22 days on March 27. Such patients included Gulshan Bibi, Shah Jahan and many others. “Have you told him (Mumtaz) that you have come here from Nawab Shah (Shaheed Benazirabad),” Shah Jahan asked his visibly annoyed brother. “He did pay no heed to it,” he said.
Minutes before this conversation, Mumtaz was heard loudly reminding someone that: “So what! People come here from across the country”.
Dr Habiba, however, believed her receptionist outside the lab was facilitating the outsiders on priority basis.
“We deal on priority basis those hailing from outside the city or referred as an emergency case,” the soft-spoken doctor told Pakistan Today.
While many were seen unhappy with Mumtaz for being given three-week time for the Echo, Karim Shah looked firm that he would be given a date not spanning beyond one week. “I would get March 12,” he confidently told this reporter.
And he finally got the desired date, thanks to his reference repeatedly named as “Mukhtar” in his conversation with Mumtaz. The chosen ones (having someone’s reference) were mostly seen hushed up by the receptionist willing to assign them an earlier date, but silently.
“We also need to take care of our colleagues when they refer somebody, won’t you?” Mumtaz counter-questioned this reporter at least thrice.
Earlier, however, the receptionist had raised some eyebrows when he repeatedly advised Karim Shah to go back to see his referee, Mukhtar. “This perhaps is for Chai Pani (word locally used for bribery),” whispered an onlooker.
Over-burdened with the work, the receptionist’s exclusive and unchecked control over assigning dates to the Echo patients seems to have turned his normally-polite behavior into that of an arrogant dictator. He does not seem to have sensed it though.
This, at one point, made him exchange some harsh words with an attendant of Karim Shah who was annoyed over his long absence from his seat. “I have no idea where this man disappears suddenly,” the attendant was heard murmuring.
Asked why the Echo Department was so overcrowded, Dr Habiba replied this was due to insufficient health facilities like Echo laboratories in the interior of Sindh and Baluchistan.
“It is because this is the only place with non-invasive procedures and people from the interior of Sindh and Baluchistan also throng here”.
Another lady doctor, apparently assistant to Dr Habiba, told Pakistan Today that on average 50 patients, half of what Mumtaz said, are treated daily at the Echo department.
