‘Sindh govt not interested in upgrading medical training facilities outside Karachi’

Not a single health facility in the rural areas of Sindh has been offering postgraduate trainings in the areas of emergency medicine and critical care, compelling doctors from all over the province to come to Karachi for training in these medical specialties, said College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan (CPSP) President Prof Muhammad Shoaib Shafi on Saturday.

“Around 77 per cent of the training facilities in the area of medicine and surgery are concentrated in Karachi and hundreds of students from different cities in the interior of Sindh have to travel to Karachi and stay here for years for training. Despite repeated requests, Sindh Health Minister Dr Azra Pechuho is not interested in upgrading medical training facilities in the interior of the province”, Dr Shafi told the inaugural ceremony of the Karachi Conference 22 of the Pakistan Islamic Medical Association (PIMA).

On the occasion, heads, incharges, healthcare professionals and staff of 10 leading public and private health facilities in Karachi who performed extraordinarily during the COVID-19 pandemic were awarded appreciation shields for serving the suffering humanity without caring for their own lives.

Vice Chancellors of leading public and private medical universities, healthcare professionals, academics and experts from different cities of Pakistan and abroad are attending the two-day conference being held at a local hotel where scientific sessions and medical education sessions have been arranged for young physicians and medical professionals.

The CPSP president also lamented the situation of postgraduate medical education in Balochistan saying that no postgraduate training facility existed outside Quetta in the province. He added that the situation of postgraduate training was better in Punjab where dozens of healthcare facilities were offering postgraduate trainings outside Lahore.

Dr Shafi said that despite growing inflation, the CPSP had not increased the fees for the postgraduate education and vowed that it would also not increase the fees in the years to come to help as much young doctors as possible.

Urging young physicians not to remain silent on atrocities against patients, the CPSP president, who is a renowned gastroenterologist, said political governments in Sindh did nothing for improving the medical education in the province.

Renowned surgeon and motivational speaker Prof Javed Iqbal in his keynote address urged the healthcare professionals not to ‘cheat’ their patients, saying patients wanted a polite and empathetic doctor examining them instead of a competent but rude medical professional.

“Healthcare professionals should not be burdening their patients with unnecessary medicines in exchange for perks and privileges from the pharmaceutical companies. Similarly, doctors should not be prescribing unnecessary diagnostic tests in exchange for money from the diagnostic labs,” he said, adding that the ill-gotten money earned this way was clearly forbidden in Islam and not permissible as per medical principles as well.

Terming the pharma-physician nexus an ‘illegitimate relationship’, he said poor patients did not deserve to be overburdened by expensive but unnecessary medicines as well as needlessly prescribed with diagnostic tests. He remarked that money should not be the ‘core outcome’ of the medical profession.

The patron of the PIMA conference, Dr Saad Khalid Niaz, said PIMA was established in 1979 to promote ethical values among healthcare professionals and serve the ailing humanity with any lust or greed.

Dr Niaz, who recently returned his ‘Tamgha-e-Imtiaz’ to the government for Pakistan for ignoring the services and sacrifices of healthcare professionals during the pandemic in the announcement of civil awards, said medicine was a noble profession through which a person could get close to the Almighty by serving the ailing humanity with passion, selflessness and dedication.

PIMA Central President Dr Khubaib Shahid, King Edward Medical University Lahore Vice Chancellor Prof Khalid Masood Gondal, PIMA Karachi President Dr Abdullah Muttaqi, Dr Atif Hafeez and others also spoke.