In traditional Thari attire, an elderly woman, carrying a child moaning with pain, has her eyes wide open in shock after being told that the doctors at the National Institute of Child Health (NICH) are on strike. Jinnat, a resident of a small village in the Umerkot district, had arrived in Karachi on Sunday evening and spent the whole night in the courtyard of NICH, along with her two-year-old granddaughter, Moomal.
At 7:00 am, she was outside an outpatient department (OPD), but after two hours, she still could not found anyone to tend to the patient. Jinnat, however, is not alone. Thousands of other patients from remote areas of Sindh and Balochistan also come to Karachi for treatment at the two major federal-government-run hospitals – NICH and Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) – but the OPDs at both the hospitals were without doctors on Monday as a protest against the devolution of these hospitals to the Sindh government after 18th amendment.
Around 5,000 patients report everyday at the 25 OPDs of JPMC while almost 7,000 children arrive at NICH daily. As Jinnat waits outside an OPD at NICH, hundreds of doctors, professors, nurses and other paramedics, instead of tending patients at the OPDs of NICH and JPMC, gather at a ’protest camp’ set up near the Jama Masjid in JPMC and also held a rally inside the hospital premises.
From 9:00am to 11:00am, thousands of patients were forced to wait until the doctors returned from their protest.
“My granddaughter is seriously ill. I brought her here on Sunday but the department [emergency ward] doctors told me to come on Monday as this was not an emergency case,” Jinnat told Pakistan Today. “I do not have any relatives in Karachi and had to spend the night in the courtyard. And now they are saying that doctors are on strike,” said the woman, with tears in her eyes.
“What can I do except wait,” complained Jinnat. She was unable to see Moomal having severe abdominal pains and the village doctors suggested taking the child to Karachi.
She repeatedly kept on saying that no doctor in her village had ever held such a protest. Hundreds of patients and their relatives – majority of them women – can be seen sitting directly under the scorching sun, as not many shades have been built by the hospital administration to cater to the large number of patients arriving at the hospital. For seven days, doctors have been protesting against the proposed devolution of the federal health ministry to provinces under the 18th constitutional amendment.
“Even if the health ministry is dissolved, JPMC and NICH can be handed over to the cabinet division, as was decided for Shaikh Zayed Hospital, Lahore which will not be given under the Punjab government,” said JPMC emergency department in charge Dr Seemin Jamali.
Ameer Hussain, an office-bearer of the Joint Action Committee of Doctors, was of the view that no patients are suffering from such protests. “The doctors are on duty two more hours in the evening and I don’t think someone has suffered,” he said.
