KARACHI: Four state-of-the-art, fully equipped Regional Blood Centres (RBCs) which have been set up in Sindh are rotting away as the provincial government has failed to operationalise them owing to incompetency and internal political brawls.
There is a traditional lack of interest and awareness that prevails amongst us when it comes to blood donation culture in Pakistan; a country where thousands of patients in need of blood transfusions swing between life and death. In June 2017, Pakistan Today reported that only 10 per cent blood comes from voluntary donors.
Keeping this in mind, ten state-of-the-art Centralised Blood Centres funded by the German government were more than a needed addition to Pakistan’s health infrastructure.
The four RBCs that the provincial government has failed to operationalise include one at Sindh Government Qatar Hospital in Karachi, and one each in Jamshoro, Sukkur and Nawabshah.
The German government, through its development bank KfW provided a 1.77 billion rupee grant to establish a safe blood transfusion system in every province of Pakistan, including the state of Azad Jammu & Kashmir. From this amount, a budget of 637 million rupees was allocated to Sindh to counter the spread of Transfusion-Transmissible Infections (TTI) caused by unsafe blood transfusions.
Under a separate agreement, the Sindh Health Department and KfW agreed to make four RBCs operational by contracting out under the Public-Private Partnership Act, 2010.
However, the August 2016 deadline for fully operationalising these RBCs has long passed.
A Health Department senior official on condition of anonymity said that a progress report of the initiative declared the Sukkur Blood Bank received a score of only 27 and was technically disqualified. Hussaini Blood Bank and The Indus Hospital were also declared technically qualified and got 77.5 and 82 technical scores out of 100, respectively.
According to sources, the entire process has suffered due to internal politics, with the tender by the higher-ups at the Health Department getting re-initiated.
Sindh Blood Transfusion Authority Director Dr Zahid Ansari confirmed that the higher-ups of the department decided to re-initiate the tender due to some technical issues.
Health Minister Dr Sikander Ali Mandhro has assured that he will probe into the entire process.