KARACHI, Oct 28: Civil Hospital Karachi’s administration took a step towards its much awaited trauma centre project after it recently floated a tender for making major structural changes in the building of the director laboratories and chemical examiner to house the neurosurgery and eye departments, the two units of the hospital which need to be demolished to make way for the trauma centre.
The centre has already been delayed for two years due to the controversy over the project site.
Though the health department officials ignored the objections against the project site and are moving ahead for its construction, the controversy is very much alive and many doctors associated with the project in different capacities still question the rationale behind building a trauma centre at a location that restricts accessibility. Due to this very reason, they believe that the huge amount of money -- Rs1.4 billion -- to be spent on this project would go to waste while criticising the displacement of an institution, a health setup and two important departments of CHK.
At the moment, the Aids control set-up at the Services Hospital, where the laboratories would be shifted, has already moved to the CHK’s infectious diseases department, while the neurosurgery and eye units are waiting to initiate the process once the building housing the laboratories, located on the premises of Services Hospital, is vacant and the required structural changes are made. “The laboratories, the sole facility serving the forensic needs of Sindh and Balochistan, are being moved from a ground plus-two building spread over an area of around 24,000-square-feet to a much smaller place at the Services Hospital to accommodate the neurosurgery and eye units. Structural changes will delay the project more. Besides, there is no point in building a trauma centre in a tertiary care hospital anyway,” a doctor said, while raising doubts about the capability of the CHK administration and the health department’s expertise in building and managing a state-of-the-art trauma centre when they have been unable to resolve the hospital’s very basic long-standing problems of water, electricity and sewerage.
Doctors not consulted
This project, he claimed, was made at the “higher level” by quarters having vested interests and imposed on the doctors concerned as none of them were ever invited to any of the meetings on the trauma centre.
“Nobody can question the importance of a trauma centre, but specialised projects need to be handled by experts and in this case it should be those doctors who have international and local experience in trauma care. The government should make the name of the experts involved public. Who will benefit from this Rs1.4bn project, which will be under the CHK’s administration, which has a poor management record?” asked another doctor.
“With this amount of money, five 100-bed trauma centres can easily be established at different hospitals,” he claimed.
The doctors also asserted that the academic council of the Dow University of Health Sciences had opposed the shifting of the neurosurgery and eye units as it would particularly affect their services.
When asked for comment over the controversy, Pakistan Medical Association President Dr Qaiser Sajjad said that he didn’t have enough knowledge about the problems involved at the project site. However, he felt that the populous city needs not one but many trauma centres, besides having a disaster management programme.
“The government should make emergency sections of all government hospitals functional round-the-clock and set up many trauma centres keeping in view the growing population. At the same time, we need to have a disaster management programme in place under which we can train staff for specialised care to better cope with all sorts of mishaps,” he said.
The 7,222-square-yards earmarked for the project on Chand Bibi Road includes the present eye and neurosurgery departments, the quarters housing city government employees and paramedical staff of the hospital.
The trauma centre project, which has no detailed study report, according to health department officials, would be completed on a fifty-fifty cost sharing basis between the federal and provincial governments.
The federal government allocated Rs50 million last year and Rs37.5 million this year while the provincial government has allocated Rs150 million this year.
