KARACHI: City Mayor Wasim Akhtar suspended two top officials of the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital on Sunday after he witnessed extremely messy conditions in one of the three major hospitals of the city.

It was like anarchy in the hospital, where hygiene was at worst levels and no one was there to mark widespread absence of hospital employees, officials said.

They added that the mayor suspended medical superintendent Dr Nadeem Rajput and his deputy Dr Mohammed Ali Mirza, who were not in the hospital when the mayor paid a surprise visit there.

The mayor was informed that the top officials’ absence was their ‘habit’, which was copied by their subordinates.

The mayor checked the attendance register and found that it had become forbidden to record the presence of the hospital staff.

“The situation made him [the mayor] very angry. He said that such an attitude was tantamount to playing with the precious lives,” said a senior official in the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation [KMC].

During his visit to various departments and sections, Mr Akhtar looked aghast at the sight of disturbing conditions.

He saw that every part of the once cleanest health-care facility was filled with dirt and garbage. Many sections were full of equipment but devoid of maintenance or technicians.

“The hospital looked like a garbage dump,” said an official.

The mayor saw faulty air-conditioners in the urology department where he was informed that they had not been functioning for the past nine months.

The section deals with patients in need of dialysis, where the availability of air-conditioners is a prerequisite.

“Its floors too were strewn with garbage and dirt, leaving Mr Akhtar stunned as it was highly against the protocols required for such facilities,” a senior KMC official said.

The building of the hospital itself was a symbol of extreme neglect on the part of the authorities and, despite time to time provision of funds, it was hard to see whether the facility had been invested for its maintenance and up-gradation for a long time.

Mr Akhtar announced that the ACs at the wards dedicated to the dialysis patients would be repaired and made functional in a couple of days.

Besides, he said, since the hospital was the largest such facility in Karachi Central district and one of the three such facilities in the city, it would be given due attention in future.

He said the MS and his deputy had been suspended for mismanagement and poor sanitation in the hospital; and, at the same time, the mayor warned that he would be paying such unscheduled visits to the hospital from time to time.

He also ordered officials to issue show-cause notices to four laboratory staffers of the hospital.

Published in Dawn, April 10th, 2017