DHQ Hospital gets exclusive electricity supply line from grid station

RAWALPINDI: To safeguard poor patients from the ill effects of electricity loadshedding, the District Headquarters Hospital in town has been supplied electricity through an exclusive feeder from Cantonment Grid Station in Mareer Hassan under a project that was started some five years back.

The electricity supply line would be exempted from electricity loadshedding and the patients at the DHQ Hospital would be able to have uninterrupted power supply round the clock. Through the new electricity supply connection, the hospital’s equipment and machinery worth millions of rupees would also become free from bad effects of electricity loadshedding.

The scheme costs around Rs40 million and the Cantonment Grid Station started providing electricity to the DHQ Hospital on Wednesday (June 7) on trial basis, said Medical Superintendent at DHQ Hospital Dr. Khalid Randhawa while talking to ‘The News’ on Thursday.

To a query, he admitted that the scheme was launched in 2012 but work on it remained discontinued for one reason or the other. In 2015, after taking charge as Medical Superintendent of DHQ Hospital, I started working on the scheme and requested concerned officials at Iesco (Islamabad Electricity Supply Company) to lay down the exclusive feeder from Cantt Grid Station to DHQ Hospital at the earliest according to the project, he said.

He, however, said the work remained discontinued for some time because of construction work being carried out for Metro Bus Service Project at that time. It is important that the DHQ Hospital was being supplied electricity through Cantonment and Pirwadhai grid stations but through public feeders that were not exempted from loadshedding. Also, the DHQ Hospital has three electricity generators in working condition however, the arrangements were unable to supply uninterrupted electricity supply to the hospital.

Earlier, in case of power outages, the patients had to suffer a lot and a number of procedures were affected but now with the exclusive feeder that is exempted from loadshedding, the working at the hospital would remain uninterrupted round the clock except for some technical fault at the Cantonment Grid Station, said Dr. Randhawa.

Chairman Board of Management Dr. Muhammad Aslam and Vice Chancellor Rawalpindi Medical University Professor Dr. Muhammad Umar have been requested to inaugurate officially the commissioning of the scheme though the new electricity supply line has been made functional for the sake of patients, he said.