PESHAWAR: Chief Minister Ali Amin Khan Gandapur here on Monday accepted the resignation of Dr Shabana Haider as chairperson of Health Foundation (HF) Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The resignation of chairperson of HF has rekindled hopes for signing contracts with private organisations to take over seven outsourced hospitals under public-private partnership initiative of health department.

Dr Shabana assumed the role of HF chairperson in September last year but developed differences with Dr Adnan Taj, the managing director of the foundation, over the legality of selection of new contractors for seven hospitals. She had rejected the contract and hinted at initiating the selection process afresh.

The public-private partnership (PPP) initiative suffered as the contracts of the partners running those hospitals already expired one and a half years ago and the old partners were requested to continue as stop-gap arrangements till the selection of new organisations.

Contracts will be signed with new private organisations to run seven outsourced hospitals

HF, a public sector entity established under Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Foundation Act, 2016, has been outsourcing those hospitals, which are not performing because doctors, nurses and paramedics don’t want to be posted there.

So far, HF has outsourced 19 hospitals to private organisations, mostly in tribal districts to improve services, according to sources. Of these, the contracts of seven hospitals with HF expired in June 2023 that were extended temporarily by the provincial cabinet.

As their contracts continued to get extended from time to time, HF remained busy in selecting new organisations through tendering for running those hospitals. HF was asked by provincial cabinet to select new partners so that the contracts of the seven hospitals could be inked.

HF completed the tendering process in January last year but could not move forward to sign agreements with the selected organisations because its Board of Governors (BoG), which is approving authority for awarding contracts to new partners, was nonexistent.

The health department notified BoG of HF in September last year that rekindled hopes that the selected partners would be given charge of the hospitals where the older partners were facing financial issues and were not willing to run the health facilities anymore. In five of the seven hospitals, partners have slashed healthcare services and patients receive only emergency services.

All the 19 hospitals demand of the government to pay them Rs1.2 billion, including Rs1 billion of the seven hospitals, whose contracts have ended.

The new BoG of HF, in its meeting early in February, rejected the selection of partners to operate the seven hospitals, which was a serious blow to the public-private partnership initiative of health department, sources said.

BoG of HF decided to refloat tenders for selection of new partners that would take many months and the partners whose contracts had expired couldn’t run the hospitals as stop-gap-arrangements because they weren’t getting money.

Dr Adnan Taj has also written a letter to adviser to chief minister on health that the decision to reject the selection of new partners for seven hospitals by BoG was illegal because the quorum was incomplete.

The meeting was conducted without fulfilling the quorum requirement under Section 5, Sub-section 4 of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Foundation Act, 2016, which stated that “six members shall constitute the quorum for a meeting of the board”. He said that the meeting was conducted without the quorum and only five members of BoG were present on the occasion.

Dr Shabana Haider resigned as chairperson of HF and now search and nomination council would select new BoG members.

Sources said that nine members, including two government and seven private ones, were required to complete BoG while six would be complete forum to take decisions.

They said that very soon the BoG would be completed and new partners would be given charge of the seven hospitals.

Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2025