The 250-bedded Capital Development Authority (CDA) hospital provides best healthcare facilities to hundreds of patients, but visitors as well as doctors are facing acute problems due to unavailability of parking facility in the hospital.
The staffers and visitors faced difficulty to park their vehicles before entering the hospital as there is no proper parking facility outside the hospital.
They parked vehicles in front and back side of the hospital on road, which is causing inconvenience to the residents.
“The hospital administration has never given any consideration to resolution of the issue, which is a constant source of inconvenience,” a senior doctor at the hospital says.
He said that the cab drivers occupied most of the space of the road so often scuffles among cab drivers and visitors could be seen outside the hospital.
Najam Shah, father of a patient visiting the hospital, said he brought his son on car but when they reached here they have to park their vehicle far away from hospital due to no specific parking area in the hospital.
The 250-beds hospital is fully equipped with the latest machines and providing modern medical and surgical facilities to the patients. The hospital provides free treatment to the CDA employees, their families and dependent parents whereas it is also open to the general public.
Consultation in the out-patient and provision of emergency treatment is free; however, non-entitled patients are charged for in-patient treatment.
Another visitor, Arshad Abbasi, told this scribe that the hospital had been constructed in a congested and densely populated area so there is no extra space to be used for the parking area.
“The authority should have kept in mind the issue before constructing the hospital, as considerable increased has been witnessed in number of patients because it provides best health facilities,” he maintained.
Talking to Pakistan Today, CDA Deputy Director Malik Sleem said that the hospital was constructed a long time ago and at that time Islamabad was a less populated city.
He said that with the passage of time the population of the metropolitan witnessed unprecedented increase due to which various problems surfaced.
“At present, there are no attempts to do away with the non-availability of the parking area, because there are residential compounds at both sides of the hospital,” he added.
However, Saleem hoped that a proposal under-consideration regarding extension of the facility so as to meet the growing needs, wherein under-ground parking facility would be provided.
Sources in the hospital told Pakistan Today that the hospital had been controlled by the CDA exclusively since its establishment in 1981; however after the local bodies’ elections in 2015, the hospital along with several other formations had been transferred to Metropolitan Corporation Islamabad (MCI) from the control of the CDA.
However, they said that the administrative control of the capital hospital was returned to the CDA because the MCI was unable to bear the expenses incurred on the hospital due to financial issues.
When contacted, the CDA spokesperson Mazhar Abbas said that the CDA was well aware of the inconvenience faced by patients and added that the issue would be solved soon. When asked about the timeframe he said that the matter be resolved in days.