LAHORE: The Punjab government has directed all the public sector medical teaching institutions of the province to start two-year postgraduate diploma in anaesthesia to help it overcome an acute dearth of the experts in the vital discipline.

It has also issued instructions for these institutions to get affiliated with the University of Health Sciences (UHS), Lahore, for launching the new programme - Diploma in Anaesthesiology (DA).

Though the step was being hailed by the professionals, they deplored that only 30 new positions were announced for the training of the students in the new programme.

It was evident from the official correspondence in which the health department had mentioned 30 training positions for anaesthesia experts, out of the total 1,090 which were distributed among all the teaching institutions of Punjab.

Besides, many teaching hospitals of the provincial capital and those situated in other major districts of the province were ignored while allocating seats for the two-year programme. The ignored institutions also include Shaikh Zayed Hospital (Lahore), Punjab Institute of Cardiology (Lahore) and the Children’s Hospital (Lahore).

An official letter says that keeping in view the current deficiency in trained human resource in anaesthesia, the government has directed all the teaching institutions of the province to immediately start enrolling doctors for training in DA Course in order to overcome an acute shortage of medics all over the province.

Out of the total 30, the government has allocated four each positions to Post Graduate Medical Institute (PGMI), Lahore and King Edward Medical University, three to Nisthtar Medical College, Multan, two each to Fatima Jinnah Medical University, Lahore, Allama Iqbal Medical College, Services Institute of Medical Sciences, Lahore, Bahawal Victoria Hospital, Bahawalpur, Punjab Medical College, Faisalabad, Shaikh Zayed Medical College, Rahim Yar Khan and one to the District Headquarter Hospital, Sargodha.

An official said presently only three teaching hospitals, out of the total UHS-affiliated 33 public sector training institutions, were running the two-year diploma course in anaesthesia. They included PGMI Lahore, Nisthtar Medical College Multan and Quad-i-Azam Medical College, Bahawalpur.

Similarly, total 44 private under and postgraduate medical institutions were affiliated with the UHS and of them only Sharif Medical College, Lahore, was offering MS in anaesthesia.

In the public sector institutions only SIMS, PGMI and PIC, Lahore, were offering the MS programme in the discipline. Besides, the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan was also offering major diploma course in the same specialty.

The official said the number of anaesthesiologists being produced by these institutions was insufficient to meet the present requirements. Particularly, he said, over 50 per cent of the hospitals in districts were functioning without anesthesia experts.

He apprehended that the two-year diploma would only help overcome the shortage at district-level public sector health facilities.

The situation, he feared, would not improve in the major teaching hospitals of Punjab if further steps were not taken in this regard since a large number of institutions were functioning without qualified anesthetics.

Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2015

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