the doctors who are opposing the reforms,” Imran Khan said while referring to a group of doctors who have moved the court against the Medical Teaching Institution Reforms Act 2015. “It took us two years to pass the health reforms from the provincial assembly,” he said.
Imran said a majority of doctors had welcomed the new health system. “There is a small group of doctors opposing the health reforms as they never worked in hospitals and don’t want to be made accountable,” he maintained.
The assembly passed the Act on January 14 and notified it on January 19 this year.
It repealed all the previous legislation, but the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Department took a fairly sedate approach in implementing the 2015 Act.
Backed by some influential doctors opposing the Act, a doctor not even serving in the public sector hospital challenged it in the Peshawar High Court (PHC) in July this year. The case is yet to be decided.
The court stopped the government from advertising positions of medical directors, hospital directors and some other important posts to select competent people from the market for these institutions. “When we introduced the biometric system in hospitals to ensure attendance of hospital employees, a small group of doctors opposed it as they didn’t want to come on time,” Imran said.
He said that they had obtained working hours details of the doctors from the biometric system installed in different hospitals. “It revealed that 33 percent of the doctors worked only for five hours instead of six hours. We came to know that 27 percent of the doctors came to hospital only for four hours, 22 percent for three hours, 17 percent for two hours and seven percent for an hour,” he added.
Imran Khan said that it was for the first time that a government had decided to surrender its powers and deliver them to the independent BoGs to run the hospitals. “We wanted to make the hospitals autonomous and run them through independent BoGs that are supposed to appoint people on merit and introduce a system of reward and punishment,” he argued.
Imran gave the example of an under-construction building in the LRH that cost Rs7 billion and couldn’t be completed in seven years. “In comparison, we built a state-of-the-art hospital for cancer patients of international standard in Hayatabad in just three years at a cost of Rs3 billion,” he pointed out.
Imran said Dr Nausherawan Burki, who happens to be his cousin, had been spending his own money and came from the US to Pakistan to improve the health system in KP.