RAWALPINDI, Nov 17: The Al-Shifa Trust is going to launch a Rs150 million project for strengthening the public hospitals’ ophthalmic facilities in 17 districts of the country.

This was disclosed by Trust president Lt-Gen (Rtd) Jahandad Khan in an interview with Dawn here on Saturday.

Mr Khan said the project would cover seven districts in the Punjab, five in Sindh, two each in the NWFP and Balochistan and one in the Azad Kashmir.

Gen Khan said the project was aimed at making the district headquarters hospitals (DHQs) and Tehsil headquarters hospitals (THQs) well-equipped for eye treatment. This, he added, would make available the modern facilities to the people living in the far-flung rural areas.

The money, the Trust chief said, would come from non- governmental organizations and philanthropists.

He said the Al-Shifa Trust, being a World Health Organization affiliate, had also offered its services to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as well as the relevant government department for treatment of the Afghan refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) suffering from eye diseases, who could not be treated at other health-care facilities because of the nature of their affliction or absence of the required facilities.

Besides treating the Afghan refugees and IDPs, he said, the trust also intended to train Afghan doctors and paramedics so that they could independently run eye treatment centres back in Afghanistan.

Several Afghan doctors and paramedics were trained by the Al- Shifa Trust before the Taliban’s assumption of power in Kabul when it suspended the programme due to certain political reasons.

The Trust has chalked out a 10-year plan for the first decade of the century that envisages the addition of two more hospitals in the NWFP and Baluchistan as well as development and expansion of its existing components — the Al Shifa hospitals in Rawalpindi and Sukkur and the Pakistan Institutes of Ophthalmology and Community Ophthalmology.

The Trust has spent Rs670 million on its existing components, the running cost of which amounts to Rs150 million. The Trust meets the expenditures through donations and Zakat and the fees collected from well-off patients.

Gen Jahandad appealed to philanthropists to give their Zakat and other donations to the Al-Shifa Eye Trust.

As many as 70 per cent of the patients coming to the Al-Shifa hospitals get free treatment on production of Zakat certificates (issued by the Zakat council), 25 per cent get subsidised treatment while only five per cent get to bear the full expenses on their treatment.