The Sindh Health Department has bowed down to the blackmailing of the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC), the National Institute of Child Health (NICH) and the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD). Despite implementation of the 18th Amendment, the JPMC, the NICH and the NICVD would be made autonomous bodies.
Not only this, but the newly appointed Sindh Health Secretary Rizwan Ahmed assured the administrations of these healthcare centres in a meeting at the JPMC on Tuesday that the healthcare centres would be run under a Board of Governors and that the Sindh government would not interfere in their affairs. Ahmed also assured the healthcare administrations that the Health Department would provide them with the budget from departmental funds.
“Though we have not received any funds for these hospitals, but despite that, we will soon provide budget to these hospitals from our own funds,” Ahmed told this scribe over the telephone. Confirming that the healthcare centres have been declared autonomous bodies, he said, “These healthcare centres have a lot of reservations over becoming a part of the provincial government. Therefore, we have decided to make them independent just like the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation.”
Ahmed also announced that not a single staff member from these healthcare centres would be sent back to their respective provinces. He made these announcements while the 18th Amendment becomes a part of the Constitution of Pakistan, and a case of the employees of these healthcare centres is under proceeding at the Sindh High Court. The JPMC, the NICH and the NICVD are the most important State-run hospitals in the province that are serving thousands of patients every day not only from different parts of the city, but also from other provinces.
According to the official records, there are around 3,800 staff members in these healthcare centres – 2,500 at the JPMC, 650 at the NICH and 650 at the NICVD – and around 80 percent of them belong to other provinces. Even though after implementation of the 18th Amendment, it has not been decided that which departments are being shifted from the Centre to the provincial governments, these employees fear that they would be sent back to their own provinces.
Besides that, senior officials at these healthcare centres are so powerful that several officials are holding up to three positions at the same time. Since implementation of the 18th Amendment has commenced, the administrations of these healthcare centres have provoked their employees to stage protests against the decision, resulting in many boycotts of wards, including the emergency wards.
After receiving the official letter of shifting these healthcare centres from the federal government to the provincial level on Monday, the Health Secretary visited the JPMC on Tuesday and conducted a meeting with the heads of the three healthcare centres, the nurses and the office-bearers of the steering committee that has been staging a protest against this move.
During the meeting, the Health Secretary asked the employees to withdraw the constitutional petition filed by the employees of these healthcare centres against the proposed move of these centres being shifted to the provincial government. “The Health Secretary asked us to withdraw the petition, but we refused and told him that the court will decide the fate of these healthcare centres,” said Prof Shaukat Ali, the president of the steering committee of employees of all three healthcare centres, during a press conference held at the JPMC.
Most common people are afraid that if these healthcare centres are declared autonomous, then they would start working as private hospitals, and the NICVD is already charging fees the same as private hospitals. The decision would be an extra burden on the resources of the provincial government since without receiving any funds from the federal government for these healthcare centres, the Health Secretary is going to provide funds to them from the Health Department’s budget.
Only the JPMC’s total budget is estimated at Rs 1.14 billion, whereas medicines cost around Rs 230 million. Some law experts are of the view that such an announcement is another attempt of the bureaucracy to fail the implementation of the 18th Amendment, which is now a part of the Constitution of Pakistan.
