PESHAWAR: The much-delayed Peshawar Institute of Cardiology (PIC) cancelled the interviews for hiring cardiologists and cardiac surgeons scheduled for today and Saturday.
The short listed candidates were informed last evening that interviews had been cancelled indefinitely.
They were told the cancellation was necessitated because of the recent notification by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), which had banned all new government recruitment across country because of the upcoming general election.
This is extremely unfair and frustrating for the applicants who came all the way from overseas only for the PIC interviews. It should be mentioned that no travelling allowance is given to the shortlisted candidates. The foreign-based highly trained people made allowance of their time and spent money on travel to be in Peshawar for the interviews only to be told about the cancellation the night before.
There is no centre of excellence for heart diseases in the entire Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. But there are four dedicated heart hospitals in Punjab at Lahore, Multan, Rawalpindi and Faisalabad.
The facilities at the Lady Reading Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Centre are inadequate to cater to over 30 million KP population.
The story of the PIC is one of incompetence, neglect and wrongful priorities of successive governments.
The foundation stone for the hospital was laid more than 20 years ago by the then chief minister, Akram Khan Durrani during the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) government. The hospital failed to be completed over the ensuing years.
The construction work was launched on the Rawalpindi Institute of Cardiology in 2010 and the hospital started functioning in 2012. It is a centre of excellence, providing quality treatment to heart patients of Rawalpindi and adjoining areas.
The MMA government failed to make any significant progress over the project during its term. The Awami National Party-Pakistan People’s Party coalition government that followed the MMA totally neglected the PIC.
The story was not different when the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government was installed in KP in 2013.
Funds were delayed for the project. These were finally released in January, this year. Applications were invited in January of this year for faculty positions and hospital director.
The BoG could not interview the applicants even in March. Finally it was decided to conduct the interviews on the 20th and 21st of this month but these were postponed indefinitely because of the ban on recruitment by the ECP.
Patients continue to suffer heart attacks everyday and die because of inadequate facilities in the provincial capital.
There are serious questions that the PIC board needs to answer. The ban on recruitment was announced more than a week ago on April 10. It is surprising that the board did not take immediate action and make representation to the ECP for exemption.
The provincial bureaucracy, likewise, should have alerted the board about the ECP notification at once. Instead, it preferred to keep silent over it.
There are many competing vested interests in the whole saga of the lone heart hospital of the province.
Some of them hope the interim set-up will hand them the reigns of the project again. The only sufferers in this tug-of-war are the people of KP.
The question that ECP needs to answer is who is going to be responsible for the deaths that may be prevented if PIC is made operational without this three or four months delay.
The ECP should take notice that there are departments such as health where recruitment of doctors could not be awaited for elections to be over.
The chief justice of Pakistan is in Peshawar. He is taking a great deal of interest in the problems of the common people.
May be the unlucky citizens of Peshawar will finally get some luck and the chief justice might take a suo moto notice of the ban on recruitment in the proposed lone heart hospital of the province. The ban on recruitment of doctors and nurses in PIC must be lifted forthwith.
The PIC is a showcase for incompetence of politicians from the MMA to the ANP-PPP and now the PTI government. Human lives are at stake. This is too critical a matter to be left hanging in the air even for days, leave alone months.
The concerned citizens hope that Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar will take cognizance of the matter.
If he decides to take notice, he might as well form a committee to investigate the years-long delay in executing a life-saving project.
