After MTI Act promulgation: Hospitals offer services to patients on Saturday

PESHAWAR: For the first time after promulgation of the Medical Teaching Institution Reforms Act 2015, the eight tertiary care hospitals in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, except the Peshawar Institute of Cardiology (PIC), offered services to patients on Saturday as previously all the nine MTIs would remain closed on Saturday and Sunday.

The Policy Board had recently taken notice of the suffering of the patients and their complaints and decided that all nine MTI hospitals will remain open for six days a week to better serve the patients.

Before implementing its decision, the Policy Board had called heads of all the MTIs to a meeting and took them into confidence to keep the hospitals open on Saturday.

However, the Peshawar Institute of Cardiology (PIC), the only dedicated hospital for cardiac patients in the province, didn’t implement the Policy Board’s decision due to reasons better known to them.

Dr Mohammad Hafizullah, a cardiologist, is member of the Policy Board as well as chairman of the PIC Board of Governors (BoG).

This correspondent tried to seek his comment as to why he failed to implement the same decision in his institute he had made for all other MTIs.

He avoided responding to a text message from this correspondent.

All the MTI hospitals, except the Mardan Medical Complex (MMC) would previously operate five days a week.

Policy Board Chairman Prof Dr Ziaul Islam told The News that all the MTIs were taken into confidence prior to the decision.

He said the hospitals would start their services from 8am to 2pm. Previously, duty hours in the MTIs were from 8am to 4pm, but these hospitals would operate from Monday to Friday.

Prof Ziaul Islam said the medical and dental colleges would operate for five days a week, starting from 8am to 3pm.

The purpose behind keeping the hospitals open six days a week was to offer uninterrupted services to patients, he added.

He said there were a lot of complaints from patients, their attendants as well as from the civil society about lack of services in the tertiary care hospitals two days a week.

Some of the doctors would disappear on Friday and return to work on Monday.

The government has been spending billions of rupees annually on MTI hospitals and has recruited hundreds of employees who were well-paid.

Besides PIC, the Qazi Hussain Ahmad Medical Complex in Nowshera and Hayatabad Medical Complex also didn’t implement the decision of the Policy Board.

According to officials of the two hospitals, they would provide services to patients from the coming Saturday.

The two other hospitals, LRH and KTH continued to work on Saturday. Chairman BoG KTH Dr Umar Ayub Khan visited the hospital and went to different departments including the outpatient departments and thanked the doctors and other employees for serving the patients on Saturday.

Interestingly, the Mardan Medical Complex (MMC) has never availed Saturday as weekly-off, though some of the faculty members would take Saturday and Sunday as weekly-off.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government had passed the MTI Act in 2015 to financially and administratively empower the tertiary care hospitals including the Lady Reading Hospital, Khyber Teaching Hospital, Hayatabad Medical Complex, Peshawar Institute of Cardiology, Mardan Medical Complex, Qazi Hussain Ahmad Medical Complex Nowshera, Bacha Khan Medical Complex Swabi, Ayub Medical Complex Abbottabad, Khalifa Gul Nawaz Medical Complex Bannu and Mufti Mahmood Medical Complex Dera Ismail Khan.

The Saidu Group of Teaching Hospital in Swat is the only tertiary care hospital that has not been declared as MTI yet apparently due to personal efforts of former chief minister Mahmood Khan as the hospital would then remain in control of the board.

Compared to MTIs, the Saidu Group of Teaching Hospital has improved its services by establishing modern sub-specialties to provide good healthcare facilities to patients in Malakand Division.