LAHORE, Dec 14: The Punjab government claims to have gird up its loins once again to ‘regulate’ private practice of doctors as it is weighing various options to discourage it for the benefit of patients.

“We are working on regulating the doctors’ private practice on the directions of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and a regulation in this regard will be introduced shortly,” Punjab Health Secretary Anwaar Ahmed Khan told Dawn.

“We are considering options like offering a monthly salary of Rs250,000 to a public hospital professor to enable him to quit private practice and only serve in his or her institution, thus, reviving the institutional practice and ensuring the availability of senior doctors during the duty hours (8am to 3pm) in the institution\hospital,” he said.

He added that all stakeholders had been taken into confidence in the deliberations.

To deal with the issue of doctors’ private practice in the province, the government had in 2003 introduced ‘institutional private practice’ under the Punjab Medical and Health Institutions Act. Under the act, the doctors of the public hospitals, if interested, will undertake private practice on the premises of the institution\hospital.

The institutional private practice was aimed at providing better health facilities to the general public at affordable charges and utilisation of the infrastructure in evening to generate revenue.

Initially, a few (doctors) followed the orders but eventually it met its ‘ultimate fate’ owing to a lack of check from the authorities concerned. The senior doctors saw the move as an attempt to bring their income into tax net and remained united to ‘fight’ against it.

A health department official suggests that the government should make it mandatory for all new recruitments of senior registrars and assistant professors in the public hospitals\institutions that they cannot do private practice. And a violator must be shown the door. “This is successfully being implemented in India and Pakistan must follow the practice,” he adds.

He says it will not be easier for the authorities concerned to stop the senior lot (professors) from private practice, therefore, it should concentrate on other ways like this to deal with the menace.

The Pakistan Medical Association too has been against the private practice of doctors. “A powerful chain of doctors is the reason behind the government’s failure to regularise institutional private practice”, an office-bearer of the association claims. He says the PMA had raised the issue time and again before the authorities concerned, but the government only came up with ‘promises’ to do away with it.

Some senior doctors are of the view that the tax issue is not primarily the main hurdle in the institutional private practice as what they get after a month by serving a public health facility is even less than that of the monthly earning of a general practitioner (GP).

“The Aga Khan Hospital and the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital are paying handsome salaries to their doctors who do not have to go for private practice,” they say, suggesting that the government should thoroughly analyse all aspects of the issue before implementing a new policy so that it must not remain on paper as was the case in the previous regime.