RAWALPINDI, Jan 6: The provincial government has released a sum of Rs130 million for strengthening emergency services at the three teaching hospitals in the city; but the plan to standarize the services has been dropped.

The district headquarters hospital has been allocated Rs30 million, while the remaining amount has been equally divided among the Holy Family Hospital and the Rawalpindi General Hospital.

The three hospitals had demanded a sum of Rs561 million to reform their emergency services. Last year, the government had decided to embark on improving emergency health-care services in all major hospitals of the province. For this purpose, a total allocation of Rs1 billion has been allocated.

"The government wants the project to be completed by the end of the current fiscal year. We have been told to complete the project by June 30, which in any case is the deadline," said an official.

At the outset, the Punjab government had announced that emergency services in all teaching hospitals would be standardized, which meant that all hospitals would have similar set of services with respect to patient-care, cleanliness, sterilization, medicine availability, operation theatres, assistance by supporting staff, diagnostic facilities, disaster management plan and staffing, etc.

However, the plan has been shelved and the hospitals have been asked to prepare their own priorities and plans in this regard. "The standardization plan had to be abandoned because of the big variation in terms of present availability of services in various hospitals," an official said.

The hospitals would now prepare their projects separately in view of their conditions and would get them approved from their respective boards of management after which they would be authorized to incur the expenditure.

The official said the priorities enumerated by the health department included availability of medicines, round-the-clock presence of senior doctors - for which they were being paid additional allowances - and provision of quality diagnostic facilities to patients in emergency wards.

A major task ahead of the health planners is to evolve a mechanism for spending the funds and procurement of state-of-the-art electro-medical equipment. A meeting in this connection is scheduled to be held this week to finalize the arrangements.

It remains to be seen how the government overcomes the absence of appropriate monitoring mechanism, which in the past had resulted in wastage of major chunk of funds allocated for medical projects. The Rawalpindi Medical College complex at the Holy Family Hospital is a reminder of how our health managers in the past squandered hefty allocations.