Patients suffer as ASH staff protests

Karachi
Routine operations remained suspended at Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for the most part of Friday as staff members protested over the target killing of a colleague, Danish Kaleem.
The 25-year-old health worker, a Muttahida Qaumi Movement activist who served on the party’s Medical Aid Committee, was shot dead by unidentified men near the Siddique-e-Akbar mosque a day earlier.
Doctors and staff members closed down several departments of the hospital – OPDs, Emergency Ward and operation theatres – as they came together to demand protection for all employees of the ASH.
Consequently, scores of patients who had come in for consultations or examinations were turned back as the protesters demonstrated around the hospital premises. Raising slogans against law enforcers and the Sindh government for their failure to deter target killers, the protesters threatened to suspend operations at all KMC-run hospitals for an indefinite period if no efforts were made for their security.
Dr Salma Kauser, a senior medical director of the KMC, said paramedics and staff of ASH were duly concerned as several of their colleagues have been targeted in recent times and none of the perpetrators have been arrested.
“Protection of life is a basic and most important right and the government must address the issue of their security in all earnest,” she said.