KARACHI: The Sindh government has spent around $6 million, or nearly Rs1 billion, mainly for imports and procurement of key medical equipment, including ventilators, to build capacity of its healthcare system to meet coronavirus challenges and enhance its treatments facilities, which have been under serious criticism from its political opponents and experts, officials and sources said on Tuesday.

An official said that an amount of $4m had already been spent for placing orders to import different equipment and healthcare machinery while the spending pertaining to remaining $2m had also been approved by the authorities.

The orders placed included a number of testing kits from different countries to build the testing capacity, which is considered as a key exercise in the fight against Covid-19.

“The procurement plan includes import of 100 ventilators,” said another official. “Other key items included more than 1,500 ICU beds, PCR machines, insulators and a number of other important healthcare products.”

He said that the consignment of ventilators had already started arriving and the process was expected to continue for another month. “Most of the imported ventilators would be provided to public hospitals in Karachi for critically ill patients requiring life support after contracting the coronavirus.”

Isolation beds

Currently, there are only 321 isolation beds at seven public and private hospitals in the city which are treating Covid-19 patients with mild to moderate symptoms.

However, the steps taken so far by the provincial government failed to impress the political opponents of the Pakistan Peoples Party, who question its planning and transparency so far.

Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf leader MPA Khurram Sher Zaman had already raised questions over the government’s performance and demanded a transparent audit into the huge spending of the Sindh government in the name of coronavirus pandemic.

CCUs at field centres

On the other hand, medical experts and managements of private hospitals suggest to the provincial government to prepare critical care units (CCUs) at its field isolation centres.

They also offered to provide ventilators as well as their doctors and paramedics to the provincial health department.

“We have recently suggested to the government to reserve some public hospitals with hundreds of beds for patients and equip them with machinery and human resources,” said a senior executive at one of the largest private hospitals in the city while referring to a meeting last month with Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah in which he sought private hospitals’ cooperation in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic and discussed possible solutions to tackle the emerging challenges.

The executive said that Sindh needed at least 5,000 more ventilators to deal with any emergency and the provincial government should pick up its effort for enhancing the number of life-support equipment and healthcare products at its hospitals and field isolation centres.

Published in Dawn, May 13th, 2020