Swabi hospital has medico-legal ward for privileged patients

PESHAWAR: What is so special about the Bacha Khan Medical Complex in Swabi that despite being a teaching hospital it has a special medico-legal cases ward with 14 beds?

It is apparently the only teaching hospital in Pakistan to have a dedicated ward for patients facing medico-legal cases.

Other teaching hospitals admit patients involved in medico-legal cases in different wards depending on the nature of their illness or injury. In case of the teaching hospital in Swabi, all patients facing medico-legal cases irrespective of the nature of their disease are admitted in this particular and designated ward.

The separate, well-furnished ward is supposed to admit patients of medico-legal cases only. Often the ward doesn’t have that many patients to occupy the 14 beds. Recently, there were two patients only in this ward.

The Bacha Khan Medical Complex, the teaching hospital of the Gajju Khan Medical College in Swabi, is unique in the sense that it is the only one in the country to have a separate ward for medico-legal cases.

Doctors and sources in the Health department said the remaining 26 beds in this ward are shared by five specialties, including orthopedics, neurosurgery, paediatric surgery, eye and ear, nose and throat, and are mostly short of beds for the significant number of patients. The needy poor patients have to suffer as the remaining beds are insufficient for those who have to be admitted for various ailments.

The sources said the 14 beds in the medico-legal cases section of the ward remain unoccupied. Instead of patients, these beds and space is occupied by the attendants of the patients and the policemen on duty with those facing medico-legal cases.

According to the sources, politically affiliated patients of medico-legal cases are admitted in this ward and given special protocol.

They said such patients mostly having no genuine medical problems are admitted for months in this ward as a special favour by certain politicians. One patient spent about four months in the ward. Some of the patients belong to the constituency of Shahram Khan Tarakai, who hails from Swabi district and is the provincial health minister. Others are his supporters or of politicians aligned to him.