NIBD offered 10 acres to set up new 500-bed facility

The Sindh government has offered to provide 10 acres on highly subsidised rates to the National Institute of Blood Disease (NIBD) for setting up a 500-bed facility to treat blood disorders, The News has learnt.

The land has been offered in Scheme 33 near the under-construction M-9 motorway or in the Korangi Creek locality. Sindh Board of Revenue officials have been asked to identify a suitable piece of land to hand over to the NIBD on government rates.

The provincial government will also facilitate the construction of the proposed ‘Institute of Blood Diseases’, as it lacks any such facility in the public sector.

Health Minister Dr Sikandar Mandhro had announced providing the land on a visit to the hospital a couple of weeks ago to hand over a cheque of Rs300 million for conducting around 150 bone marrow transplants a year free of charge.

A team of experts, led by NIBD Director Dr Tahir Sultan Shamsi, have already performed the first bone marrow transplant (BMT) of a 19-year-old boy from Karachi at the Sindh government’s expense.

The Punjab and federal governments are already providing millions of rupees to the NIBD for conducting free BMTs on patients from different areas of Punjab and other parts of the country.

Government officials have admitted that they have already wasted billions of rupees in the past two decades on trying to set up a public BMT facility in Sindh, but after realising their incapability, they decided funding the NIBD for conducting free BMTs and establishing a state-of-the-art centre in Karachi to treat a large number of patients.  

NIBD’s expansion

“After identifying a suitable piece of land in Scheme 33 and the Korangi Creek area, the NIBD will be asked to select one,” said a government official.

“This land will be provided on government rates, which is highly subsidised and only offered for welfare projects.”

Dr Shamsi said that during his visit to the NIBD a couple of weeks ago, the health minister had made the assurance of providing a piece of land for the facility to establish a big hospital.

Dr Mandhro had also made the assurance of facilitating the NIBD in setting up a spacious and well-equipped hospital for the treatment of growing blood disorders in Pakistan, added Dr Shamsi.

“Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif has already committed to help us establish a 500-bed state-of-the-art institute of blood diseases in Lahore, and now the Sindh government has stepped forward to help us set up a similar centre in Karachi. This is good news for the children born with blood diseases and their parents.”

BMT is a sophisticated treatment for patients suffering from blood diseases, such as thalassaemia, various types of leukemia or blood cancers and other blood disorders, in which their faulty or diseased bone marrow is replaced with healthy marrow from a donor, and it costs between Rs2.5 million and Rs5 million in the private sector, said the NIBD director.

He said that as many as 10,000 needed bone marrow transplants in Pakistan annually, but hardly 200 of them managed to avail the treatment due to its expensive cost, as only a few private hospitals in the country were capable of performing the procedure, adding that none of the country’s public hospitals was offering the service for free.

Dr Shamsi said that due to the NIBD’s growing reputation in treating blood diseases, conducting successful BMTs and other interventions, patients from not only across Pakistan but also from other countries, including Afghanistan and some Gulf states, also turned to the facility, but due to limited space and lack of trained and qualified manpower, they were unable to treat the increasing number of patients.

“We are getting patients from Punjab at their provincial government’s expense, from other provinces at federal expenses, and now at the expense of the Sindh administration, but we have limited capacity for conducting BMTs at the moment. We need more space, more operation theatres, more wards and, most of all, more trained and qualified staff to deal with the growing influx of patients.”

The NIBD director said that with the establishment of the 500-bed institutes of blood disorders in Karachi and Lahore, lives of around 1,000 patients a year could be saved.

However, he added, Pakistan needed 20 such hospitals in various cities, as the number of children being born with blood disorders was growing, with more than 10,000 children requiring BMTs a year to live a healthy, normal life.