LAHORE: The Jinnah Hospital, one of city’s major health facilities, continues to face administrative, financial and healthcare issues due to delay in key appointments and approval of schemes.

The hospital shares an enormous burden of patients from all over the province for specialised treatment. Currently, it faces shortage of teaching, administrative and technical staff.

Inordinate delay in the approval of many schemes is affecting departments including nephrology, Main Intensive Care Unit, Umar ICU, anesthesia, admin, finance department, pulmonology, cardiology, audiology, neurosurgery and paediatric surgery.

The institute had forwarded SNEs (scheduled for new expenditure) for creation of positions to the health authorities for consideration in 2009 and 2011 but most cases are still awaiting approval by the finance department. Many positions were created by the Board of Management of the institute.

The institute needs 242 new positions for three departments -- nephrology, newly-established Umar ICU and main ICU. The paediatric surgery department is headed by Jinnah Hospital Chief Executive Prof Dr Mahmood Shaukat. His department has no designated ward or staff including doctors though he had established this department shortly after joining the institute as principal.

The patients have to be treated in other departments as a stopgap arrangement. “As many as 30 new positions for the teaching staff, nurses, paramedics and other employees were recommended to run this department,” said an official.

The hospital’s Buildings Department is responsible for repair and maintenance, renovation, re-construction and rehabilitation of the buildings of the hospital, allied college and Doctors’ Colony but it has is own building in a dilapidated condition for the last many years. It has no regular staff and depends on the Board of Management for hiring of the contract staff every year.

Seeing the government functionaries’ failure to create new regulation positions, the BoM a few weeks ago again accorded approval for filling 12 positions including director, EXEN, SDOs and other staff of the Buildings Department on a ‘contract basis’.

Almost same is the situation with the admin & finance departments of the teaching hospital. The director finance, a budget & account officer and a cashier are regular employees against sanctioned posts. More than 30 other positions had been created by the BoM.

The institute had recommended creation of eight new positions for this department but the case had been pending for the last many years, said the official.

Shortage of anesthetic experts in the hospital for the last many years is criminal. It has adversely affected the critical care to the patients to the extent that some operative theaters are not fully functional. Many surgeries are routinely postponed.

“This department needs 12 new positions for teaching faculty and other doctors besides technical staff,” the official said.

Health Secretary Jawad Rafique Malik neither attended his cell phone nor responded to the messages.

AIMC Principal Prof Mahmood Shaukat said the institute was pursuing the cases and recently the finance department had agreed to give ‘relief’ in some of the recommendations of the institute.

“The finance department has agreed to create new positions for the neurosurgery and paediatric surgery departments,” Prof Shaukat said. The finance authorities had sought from the AIMC/Jinnah Hospital administration new financial assessment of the positions for neuro and paediatric surgery.

“The financial assessment is in final stage and we are going to write to the finance department about it,” he said. It had raised technical and administrative objections to many SNEs related to the new positions for the cardiology department, dispensers, buildings department, anesthesia etc.

It had turned down the proposal for the creation of new positions in cardiology department, he said.

He said the AIMC was working on a proposal to re-forward another SNE for the new positions in anesthesia department.

Published in Dawn, October 22nd, 2014