PESHAWAR: As the PTI is poised to assume power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa after sweeping the Feb 8 elections, Prof Nausherwan Burki, the cousin of party founder Imran Khan and brains behind the Medical Teaching Institution Reforms Act, 2015, claims that the next government will do away with the current MTI boards of governors installed by the caretakers.

“As soon as the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf forms the government [in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa], all MTIs will have ourBoGs, whose members will be appointed purely on merit,” Prof Burki told Dawn.

The MTIRA was introduced in 2015 by the PTI’s first government in the province.

Under it, the major government hospitals and medical and dental colleges affiliated with them were governed by the respective boards selected by the health minister-led Search and Nomination Council.

Says new BoG members to be appointed ‘on merit’

However, the current caretaker government removed BoGs members and made new appointments to the all-powerful panels.

Prof Burki, the chairman of the MTI Policy Board, was also among those removed unceremoniously.

He denied that PTI failed to fully implement the MTIRA in hospitals and affiliated institutions in the last eight years.

“There was no failure. It’s a reform process that takes time to show results,” he told Dawn.

He said as the PTI claimed a landslide victory in Feb 8 elections,

he along with other stakeholders planned speedy yet effective implementation of the healthcare reforms agenda not only to benefit patients in the province but to help promote medical education as well.

Prof Burki, a former chairman of the BoG of Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital, where the MTIRA was first enforced, said the board brought more than 40 medical specialists to the LRH from abroad.

“We established the first-ever specialised emergency medicine department [in LRH] where doctors are now getting postgraduate training. We also introduced new specialties like ENT, pediatrics, oncology and cardiology,” he said.

He, however, said many of those specialists quit jobs after the PTI’s rule came to an end.

Prof Burki said more than a dozen cardiologists came in from the US, UK and other countries to work in the MTI Peshawar Institute of Cardiology to benefit patients. The institute employed specialists to perform heart operations and other procedures – a first in any public sector hospital of the country,” he said.

He added that currently, 10 MTIs in the province were run by BoGs.

“We incorporated several amendments to the MTIRA to reform it and will do so if the need arises but I think a new system is required to improve patient care,” he said, adding that a law for the purpose has been passed by the provincial assembly and cleared by the Peshawar High Court.

Prof Burki said the coming PTI government would continue with healthcare reforms benefiting patients and promising better incentives and chances of promotion for doctors, paramedics and nurses.

He said the province had a highly-dedicated healthcare workforce that helped tackle the Covid-19 pandemic effectively.

“The PTI government will pursue health reforms aggressively, undo the illegal decisions of the current BoGs and extend the MTI law to other hospitals,” he said vowing to grant financial and administrative autonomy to public sector hospitals and free them from political influence.

Published in Dawn, February 13th, 2024