KARACHI, May 6: The Karachi Children’s Hospital — built at a cost of Rs24 million more than four years ago and lying unutilized since then— is likely to see its first patients soon, it was learnt on Tuesday.

Officials claim its outpatient department will start functioning within three weeks. According to a well-placed source in the health department, Sindh’s governor wants to see the hospital made functional as soon as possible.

The governor has visited the hospital building — situated in North Karachi — two times. Each time he went there he took his advisers and senior officials of the health department with him.

During his latest visit to the site on Monday he instructed the adviser to chief minister for health, Noman Saigal, and health secretary Ashiq Hussein Memon to depute some physicians and surgeons to the hospital who could open an OPD department there within the next 20 days.

The governor said if needed doctors could be transferred from other institutions and at the same time efforts should be made to create permanent positions in the hospital.

A senior official said opening the hospital’s OPD department on an ad hoc basis indicated that all was not well. The governor might be finding it difficult to get things moving.

“That’s why he is now looking for an easy way out. My worst fear is that if this hospital is opened on an ad hoc basis it will always remain mismanaged and underutilized.”

Meanwhile, the project’s revised PC-1 says the total cost of the hospital will be Rs51 million out of which Rs24 million have already been spent. The PC1 envisages that 2,000 children will be visiting the hospital every day.

The hospital’s equipment, bought at a cost of Rs20 million, are lying in the health department’s stores near the Ojha Institute of Chest Diseases. The recurring expenses of the hospital were expected to be about Rs10 million per year.

LIAQUATABAD HOSPITAL: The governor also visited the Government Hospital Liaquatabad observed that the cleaning arrangements there were not satisfactory, adds PPI.