January 06, 2009	Tuesday	Muharram 08, 1430

HYDERABAD, Jan 5: The Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited has put the Isra University Hospital on the list of hospitals where the company’s employees could avail of health services in addition to the Combined Military Hospital (CMH).

According to PTCL union leaders Shakeel Ahmed Khan and Jawed Saleem, the company’s Hyderabad management approached Islamabad-based management and urged it to bring the hospital on its panel.

And now serving and retired employees would have access to consultation, admission and surgical facilities in the private hospital. So far they had only CMH Hyderabad on the list.

“The PTCL management must be praised for doing a right thing at the right time. It’s really a significant development that the employees would now have access to a hospital which was providing quality health services,” said union leader Shakeel Ahmed Khan.

However, he laid stress on simplifying the procedure for provision of medicines. Employees and union leaders hailed the initiative and said that it was the need of the hour and the management had done the right thing for workers.

Now that one of the major issues has been resolved, the employees call for simplifying procedure for provision of drugs and pathological services of Aga Khan Hospital, which has stopped offering pathological services to PTCL employees for quite some time.

The employees demand that laboratory services of AKH that were available to employees in past should be resumed immediately.

Some of the employees said that the PTCL authorities were required to simplify the procedure of drugs’ provision, which entailed a lot of work on part of poor employees, majority of whom were now retired in the wake of voluntary separation scheme (VSS) announced last year by the management.

Around 22,224 employees serve in the PTCL’s Hyderabad region that covers defunct divisions of Hyderabad and Mirpurkhas and Gulshan-i-Hadeed, Karachi.

These employees include 865 currently serving employees and their 6,055 dependents, 10,370 retired employees and their 2,074 dependents and 2,860 employees of other regions.

Besides CMH, other major facilities at the disposal of PTCL employees are the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD), Taj Medial Complex, Liaquat National Hospital and PNS Shifa in Karachi and the Nuclear Institute of Medical Radiotherapy (NIMRA) in Jamshoro.

The employees suffer financially due to cumbersome procedure. The cardiac patients needing angiography, angioplasty or open heart surgeries are required to complete procedural formalities that consume a lot of time.

“Mostly, cardiac patients always approach doctors in emergency but they can’t be allowed treatment immediately as they need to first get approval for advance payment cheque through the company’s Karachi-based authorities,” said an employee.”