PESHAWAR, July 19: Hundreds of doctors and paramedics are awaiting job regularization even though the NWFP government has regularized the services of all contract employees recruited after July 1, 2001. Through a unanimously approved bill the NWFP Assembly has regularized the services of all employees recruited on contact basis on July 5 this year. But hundreds of senior doctors and paramedics working at the Khyber Teaching Hospital (KTH), Lady Reading Hospital (LRH), Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC), Peshawar and Ayub Teaching Hospital (ATH), Abbottabad have not yet been regularized.

Officials said the number of senior doctors awaiting regularization exceeded 100. These doctors were appointed through departmental selection committees at the four teaching hospitals.

The provincial health department had appointed about 60 senior registrars (SRs) at the teaching hospitals in October 2002 after holding interviews through the respective selection committees at these institutions.

Most of the appointees had already been working as regular employees under the health department before they were promoted to the post of senior registrar.

The aggrieved doctors told Dawn that the services and general administration department (S&GAD) had issued directives to the health department on April 16, 2003, requesting that they be regularized as they happened to be regular employees of the health department.

Doctors said that they had been told by the health department that they would be regularized and considered as regular government employees — a promise that has been left unfulfilled.

Representatives of doctors on contract said that thousands of their counterparts in different government departments had been regularized after the passage of the bill by the provincial assembly, but the bureaucracy was still delaying tactics.

According to them, the future of more than 100 doctors, including specialists and dental surgeons, was at stake. Many of them had worked as specialists in medicines, surgery, nephrology, gynaecology and orthopaedics, etc, while the general cadre doctors and dental surgeons had been posted in remote areas of the province.

Likewise, the paramedics, among whose ranks include dispensers, operating theatre assistants, and X-ray and ECG technicians, said that they had celebrated the assembly’s passage of the bill concerning regularization but expressed concern over the government’s indifference to their plight.

An official at the health department said that the establishment department was keen to regularise the services of contract employees of the teaching hospitals, because these hospitals had become autonomous bodies after the Autonomy Ordinance 2002.

According to the ordinance, employees of these hospitals are to be considered contractual workers because they had been chosen by the departmental selection committees.

He said that the health department was trying its level best to regularise the doctors and paramedics working in the teaching hospitals.

According to him, a section of the Ordinance 2002, which says that the employees of these institutions would not be considered as regular government employees, was the main hurdle in the way of regularization.

He said that a committee under Health Minister Inayatullah Khan with secretaries of health, law, finance, establishment, dean postgraduate medical institute (PGMI) and representatives of the contract doctors had been formed to find out a way to regularise the contract employees.

“The first meeting of the committee has taken place, and it has decided to incorporate amendments to the Autonomy Ordinance 2002 to pave the way for the regularization of the services of these employees,” said a source who attended the meeting.