April 18, 2008	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 11, 1429

LAHORE, April 17: Taking their cue from the previous regime, the PML-N-led government has begun the journey of health-sector development by adopting the route to ‘quick fixes’.

In the light of the government’s decision to remove all those employees who were either re-hired or granted extension after retirement in Punjab, King Edward Medical University Vice-Chancellor Prof Mumtaz Hasan had to quit the coveted post he had been ‘looking after’ on the government’s ‘verbal request’ for the last eight months or so.

Prof Hasan was actually given a three-year extension as professor of medicine in September last year, but the government had not issued any other directive regarding his appointment as an acting vice-chancellor. However, he was asked to ‘look after’ the affairs of the varsity which was earlier a prestigious medical college of the country.

According to a source in the health department, the new government, instead of appointing a full-time KEMU vice-chancellor, has asked Fatima Jinnah Medical College (Lahore) Principal Prof Majid Chaudhry to ‘look after’ the KEMU affairs. However, the source said, the appointment of Prof Chaudhry as an ‘ad hoc VC’ had been delayed on the intervention of some influential people who wanted their own man posted there.

Similarly, University of Health Sciences vice-chancellor Prof Husain Mubashar Malik’s tenure expired in April last, but he was asked to continue ‘looking after’ the varsity affairs as the (previous) government failed to find a ‘man of his caliber’.

Like the last government, the incumbent one also seems uninterested in hiring new vice-chancellors of the medical universities of the country through a search committee. Although the previous government had constituted a six-member search committee for shortlisting a suitable candidate from the country or abroad for the KEMU vice-chancellorship, it could not go beyond rhetorics as a result of which the country’s oldest institution remained without a ‘full-time’ vice-chancellor.

“We are surprised at the government’s ad hoc arrangements in filling highly important posts of premier institutions. The PML-N government must accord priority to the public-sector health facilities if it wants to give relief to the people,” pleaded a senior doctor, who wished not to be named.

He also questioned the authorities as why they were taking ‘so much time’ in filling the posts of heads of the Allama Iqbal Medical College, Lahore; the Shaikh Zayed Medical College, Rahim Yar Khan; and medical superintendents of some public-sector hospitals in Punjab when they were quick to shuffle top bureaucrats.

“Perhaps the health sector does not figure in the government’s priority list,” he regretted. —Zulqernain Tahir