PTI leader Chaudhry Muhammad Sarwar issued a white paper about the bad performance of the Punjab government in the health sector and said that there is one doctor to look after 1,700 patients in the province.
According to the white paper, the total number of tuberculosis patients is now 34,000 which is annually incremented by 20,00 each year. There are seven million patients of Hepatitis in Punjab. There are a total of 2,450 basic health care centres in Punjab and 50 percent of these are experiencing shortage of doctors.
Patients are being put on a wait list of six to seven months for angiography and one year for heart bypass in cardiology institutes. MRI machine is not available in the Mayo Hospital Lahore which is one of the Asia’s largest hospitals.
Only 10 out of 100 patients get free medicine from hospitals. The government has professed its failure by initiating privatisation of the government hospitals in 10 districts. Punjab does not have a health minister since two years. The count of dengue patients has risen to 2,000 and out of these 60 died during past two years.
Ch Sarwar said that the absence of a health minister in Punjab shows that the government is least interested in health and also proves its bad governance. The hospitals have vacancies for doctors and these slots have not yet been filled, he said.
“The attendance of doctors in rural areas is less than 60 percent. The government claims to have transformed Lahore into Paris, but here even children are put on a wait list. In children hospitals there is a wait of 6 to 7 months for small operations and two years for intense operations. In the absence of essential facilities, women are giving birth to children on stairs of the hospitals,” he said. About 2,000 poor patients have to visit cardiology hospitals repeatedly in order to get free medicine and timely operations of cardiac patients are now a dream, he said.
It is to be noted that 10 percent patients die due to late operations. The government has failed to make the cardiology hospital of Wazirabad functional even after 2.5 years in power. He further said hundreds of posts of senior registrar, assistant professor and specialist doctor are lying vacant in government hospitals, adding that Ganga Ram hospital, General hospital, Jinnah hospital, Mayo hospital, lady Wellingdon hospital and all other hospitals in Punjab lack basic facilities. He further said that the privatisation policy hospitals in 10 districts is in fact the confession of the failure of the government to administer facilities in the health sector.
