Larkana: The Sindh government has released Rs225 million, a 25% of allocated budgetary grant-in-sid, to the administrative department for Child Life Foundation (CLF) to manage children emergency rooms at various hospitals in Sindh, PPI learnt here on Friday.
The amount has been placed at the disposal of administrative secretary for further disbursement to the concerned quarter, subject to fulfillment of all codal formalities during the current financial year 2020-21. In this connection, a letter has also been issued by the health department. The expenditure involved has been sanctioned from the allocated budgetary grant of Rs 900 million.
It must be mentioned here that nine CLF centres have been established at various cities having total 480 beds capacity. The breakup of these centers include 50 beds each at Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, Civil Hospital National Institute of Child Health (NICH), Liyari General Hospital of Karachi, Liaquat University Hospital Hyderabad, Ghulam Muhammad Mahar Medical College Hospital Sukkur, Chandka Medical College Hospital Larkana and Peoples Medical College Hospital Nawabshah. Sindh Government Hospital, Korangi, Karachi has 80 beds capacity.
Apart from that, Satellite Centres has also been established at Mithi, Ghotki, Dadu, North Nazim Abad and Sehwan.
The Sindh government has provided CLF with services of its doctors, buildings, electricity, funds, medicines and they have only hired services of few doctors, nurses, and paramedics only to properly manage these centres which shows the extreme incompetence and negligence of the provincial government because it is unable to run its own institutes, a senior doctor said. He asked how private parties are managing their institutions?
He said: “Thousands of vacant posts of doctors, nurses and paramedics are not being filled on merit, but services of private parties are being hired on higher charges.”
This is the same situation, he added, under which Thalassemia Centres have been outsourced to private parties under the same notorious Public-Private Partnership system. There are several patients’ complaints against this system under which only statistics are made but even injections are administered by the paramedics of government hospitals and blood is supplied by the public sector hospitals for Thalassemia patients, he added.
He demanded that administrative working of the entire health care institutions across Sindh should be improved where highly trained doctors should be posted, political interference in government departments specially health and education sectors, should be made a crime and appointments be made on merit then poor people will be able to get proper benefits from the government-run hospitals.