October 20, 2008	Monday	Shawwal 20, 1429

PESHAWAR, Oct 19: The NWFP government has decided to appoint chief executives (CEs) at four major hospitals on lucrative packages to benefit their ‘blue-eyed’ in the health sector.

“The government has started the process of appointing chief executives at the teaching hospitals and more than 80 candidates are in the run for the posts, carrying Rs200,000 monthly salary,” sources said, adding that earlier the exercise had proved fruitless and the provincial government’s current move aimed at appointing chief executives on political basis.

The government’s move to reappoint chief executives would prove a failure due to flaws in the NWFP Medical and Health Institutes Reforms Act, passed by the provincial assembly on October 13, 1999, experts said.

The then provincial government had passed the law with a view to grant financial and administrative autonomy to the teaching hospitals and improve healthcare facilities. The health department appointed chief executives at the Khyber Teaching Hospital (KTH), Lady Reading Hospital (LRH), Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC) Peshawar and Ayub Teaching Hospital Abbottabad in 1999 against a lump sum salary of Rs150,000.

Under the law, the chief executive was the chairman of the Institution Management Council (IMC), which appointed the chief executive. But last time, the chief executives had been appointed by the health department.

Actually, the government has failed to implement a law aimed at granting financial and administrative autonomy to the four hospitals after the lapse of nine years. “The law states that the provincial government would not interfere into the affairs of institutions and instead they be run by the IMC, which has also a flawed structure. Of its six members, none is from the government side, which had made it a redundant body,” the experts said.

According to the law, each hospital had to be headed by a chief executive with 10 years experience to be selected through advertisements. However, the posts were being held by professors after the government discontinued appointing chief executives. The professors held the posts without being paid additional salaries.

Officials at the health department said that the process had been initiated at the top level and they were not involved. They said that indications were that two of the four slots would go to the ruling Awami National Party’s nominees and two to the Pakistan People’s Party, a coalition partner in the provincial government.

The health secretariat and directorate, which had been supervising these hospitals administratively since long, were not willing to lose control over them. The sources said that the hospitals’ managements had never remained a specialised area in the province. Therefore, it was difficult to identify suitable officials for the job.

“The province has so far not separated the administrative cadre in the health sector due to which management posts are being held by the general cadre doctors. And there is no clear criterion under which the government would appoint appropriate persons, but the candidates banking on their political clout, would get the well-paid slots,” they said.

Before the initiation of the move, the government should have removed the anomalies in the law and only then had opted for the appointments of the chief executives, added the sources.