NAB probe team visits LRH

PESHAWAR: The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) on Monday visited Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s oldest and largest public health facility — the Lady Reading Hospital Peshawar — where the hospital administration gave them a detailed briefing and took them to different locations of the hospital.

Senior officials of the hospital told The News that the NAB investigators got impressed after a detailed briefing given to them by the hospital administration and their visit to different facilities of the hospital.

“It was neither a raid nor surprise visit as propagated by some of the doctors. It was a planned visit as the NAB had informed the hospital administration a few days ago about their visit to the hospital,” said an official of the LRH administration.

The LRH Hospital Director, Brig (retried) Dr Abrar Khan received the NAB team and briefed them about the medical teaching institute (MTI), budget of the hospital, the number of staff and facilities given to the patients.

“The NAB team neither seized any record nor did give any intention regarding any arrests,” said official of the hospital administration on condition of anonymity.

He said it was the LRH where the MTI law has practically been implemented that helped change face of the hospital interns of patient care, quality of services as well as accountability of the staff.

A five-member NAB team rather than visiting the new and state of the art building preferred to inspect old parts of the hospital and went to the cardiology block and dialysis facility, set up in one of the oldest portions of the hospital.

Ziaullah Toru, led the combined investigation team of the NAB.Meanwhile, senior officials of the NAB told The News that they would continue their investigations into the hospital, particularly utilisation of the budget, procurement of the equipment, medicines as

well as staff.

“The hospital is given Rs5 billion budget in which Rs3.5 is spent on salaries of the hospital staff. It is the largest hospital with 2000 beds and we thought they could have collected a handsome revenue but it was not the case and we told them that this is a very performance as far as the revenue is concerned,” said one member of the NAB team.

Pleading anonymity, he said it was not possible to collect all the details in three hours but there was no issue in provision of services to patients as well as availability of medicines and presence of the staff.

“It is a story of the past nine years and billions of rupees. We got details of the hospital staff and would investigate if the hospital was really needed such a large staff,” the NAB official said.

Also, the NAB team decided to investigate salaries of the hospital staff and check if their salaries were according to the market rules.According to the NAB team, the hospital was procuring medicines worth millions of rupees but it didn’t have a barcode.

“LRH was not the only hospital where the medicine lacked barcode. We visited the hospitals in Nowshera, Abbottabad, Haripur and Mardan but none of these hospitals had barcodes on their medicines,” the NAB official revealed.

The NAB team gave a 10 day time to the LRH administration to ensure barcode on their medicines and vowed to visit them again.