ISLAMABAD: Employees of the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) have written a letter to the Chief Justice of Pakistan to ensure the implementation of a court decision and said if this was not done soon, the hospital as well as its employees would suffer.

In January 2019, the Supreme Court had rejected the plea of the Sindh government and ordered the federal government to take control of the JPMC, National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases and National Institute of Child Health in Karachi and Sheikh Zayed Postgraduate Medical Institute in Lahore. Moreover, the court had stipulated a 90-day period for the transition, but the order has not been implemented.

However, the federal government has been considering handing over the hospitals to the provincial governments as it would then become the responsibility of the provinces to provide funding to them.

In the letter, a copy of which available with Dawn, it has been mentioned that after the 18th Constitution Amendment, hospitals were handed over to the provinces, but initially, the Sindh High Court and then the Supreme Court issued verdicts that the medical institutes should be handed over to the federal government.

However, the federal cabinet had on July 2, 2019 refused to implement the order of the court within the stipulated time in violation of the Constitution.

Employees of different medical institutes then filed a contempt of court petition against the federation in the Supreme Court and the federation agreed to implement the judgement in six weeks and gave an undertaking in writing to the court, but did not implement it.

“Federal Cabinet on 3rd March 2020 in complete disregard of the Constitution refused again to obey the judgement of the court in a contemptuous way perhaps to undermine the judiciary. Not only that the federal secretary Ministry of National Health Services was summarily removed from the post on 4th March for pleading implementation of Supreme Court judgement,” the letter states.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2020