LAHORE: A former medical superintendent of the Jinnah Hospital and three female pharmacists have been awarded punishments after charges of misuse of authority and negligence proved against them.

The Punjab chief minister, being the competent authority, has approved the punishment of recovering Rs1 million from ex-MS Dr Tahir Rasheed and withholding three years promotion of the pharmacists.

An official report stated that Dr Tahir Rasheed, as MS of the Jinnah Hospital Lahore, was accused of exercising financial powers which were beyond his jurisdiction.

He didn’t inform the Board of Management of the government teaching institute while purchasing medicines and disposables through Local Purchase (LP). It stated the then MS failed to keep a strict oversight on the whole local purchase process that led to so many procedural violations, ultimately leading to financial loss to public exchequer.

“It was observed that almost every day in a particular month a single vendor was participating but no action was taken by you against the non-participating vendors”, reads the report.

Similarly, Dr Fazeelat being LP in-charge of morning shift, was held responsible for uploading the demand tender in the morning and not maintaining the expense register. She failed to report the procedural violations committed by the evening staff to the competent authority.

“The bills were checked by you but the variation in prices and non-observance of demanded brands was never questioned by you. You were monitoring the PITB portal, but the non-participation of vendors was never reported by you to the competent authority so that appropriate action could be taken against them”, reads the report.

About the allegations against other pharmacist, Nayab Khalid, the report said she was responsible to include received medicines and disposables as per demanded brands, acknowledge of the delivery time and uploading the relevant data on the PITB Portal. “However, you failed to discharge your major responsibilities as you did not upload the data timely to the PITB Portal as per the government policy owing to which huge discrepancy was observed between the portal data and the vendor invoices”, reads the report.

Instead of portal generated invoices, manual receiving had to be used while counter verifying the vendor invoices which themselves were deficient in providing certain information. “You received the alternate brands without any proper approval from the competent authority and even if you did take some directions in this regard, you failed to provide any such written evidence to the fact finding committee,” reads the report.

The report said she acknowledged that she meticulously checked the prices but failed to provide satisfactory answer as to how she checked those prices in case of alternate supply. “You also acknowledged that you are not responsible for checking variation in prices, however, the manual receiving are signed by you which showed that you were correcting prices of certain items, so in fact, you were checking the variation in prices in reality,” says the report.

It said Ms Afia Azmat, another pharmacist, completely failed to monitor and streamline the system and failed to implement the policy guidelines as provided by the government. She neither took any action herself nor informed the competent authority about the procedural violations being committed by the relevant LP staff.

The inquiry was held by Punjab Cooperatives Department Secretary (BS 20) Ms. Musarrat Jabeen who then recommended the punishments when allegations against the MS and three pharmacists proved to be true.

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2025