Misbah to help set up children’s heart hospital

LAHORE : Renowned cricketer Misbahul-Haq has joined hands with Pakistan Children’s Heart Foundation (PCHF) to establish Pakistan’s first hospital dedicated to congenital heart defects (CHD) among children.

Till date PCHF has provided financial support for over 1,190 surgeries across Pakistan costing approximately Rs400 million. PCHF CEO Farhan Ahmed said the hospital was an envisaged project of 100 bed, focused on providing free of cost surgeries for deserving patients, training resources to enable other hospitals, contribute in research, medical missions, advocacy, public awareness and education of patients and their families.

While chairing the meeting, Provincial Health Minister Dr Yasmin Rashid said during her medical practice the child mortality rate was high but now this rate has been alarmingly high. She congratulated the PCHF efforts to establish a milestone in the field of infant cardiac surgery.

During the panel discussion on the subject of “The role of Celebrities in Philanthopy”, the panelists including cricketer Inzamamul-Haq, Misbahul-Haq, Mushtaq Ahmed, Ather Imran and Awais Rauf said it was heartbreaking to believe that infant mortality rate was the high in the country.

During another panel discussion on “Newborn Mortality in LIC”, Dr Zakaur-Rehman, Dr Tariq Cheema, Fadia Kashif and Dr Masood Sadiq told the audience about the need of a separate hospital in the country to treat infant’s heart diseases.

They said we only have five public and two private institutions for pediatric cardiac surgeries. Similarly, the number of pediatric cardiac surgeons was also very low. Dr Zaka emphasised on creating opportunities to provide treatment to all children with hole in their hearts.

donation: The Government College University, Lahore Saturday received donation of 15,000 books, journals and research reports by an NGO, Applied Socio-Economic Resource Center (ASR).

The donation also included more than 0.3 million clippings of media reports on different issues including human rights violations reported in the last 35 years.

Earlier on Friday, GCU Vice-Chancellor Prof Dr Hassan Amir Shah and ASR Executive Director Nighat Said Khan had signed an accord for the donation of resource to GCU for the promotion of research in social sciences especially women’s and gender studies.

Nighat Khan said ASR had set up a library in 1983 for research and academic purposes at the ASR’s Institute of Women’s Studies, Lahore. She said different universities had requested for this library but ASR felt most comfortable with GCU which had produced eminent luminaries in almost all fields of life. She said the complete library had been donated to GCU which also contained research thesis and video lectures of foreign social scientists on a wide range of subjects. The Vice-Chancellor gratitude the ASR management saying that this was one of the finest book collection donated to GCU in decades.