PESHAWAR, Oct 17: The NWFP governor Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah has said the government wanted to improve the health care system.

Talking at a joint presentation given to him on the post-autonomy scenario in the four major hospitals and their allied institutions in NWFP at Governor’s House here on Wednesday, the governor said that though we have a strong health care system in the province but it was overburdened, therefore we should focus our attention on the secondary health care in order to make it efficient in meeting the requirements of our people. He said the number of 600 posts of doctors and paramedics that have already been sanctioned would be placed at various district headquarter hospitals of the province.

Regarding the institutionalized practice, the governor ordered that service of every specialty should be available in the government tertiary hospitals in order to avoid inconvenience to the public. He stressed the need for making private practice in government hospital so efficient that the people could feel the difference in it.

He said private practice out of government hospitals should  also be streamlined and made compatible with  the requirements of the rules. He said more and more doctors should be induced to start private practice at government hospitals so that the equipment of these hospitals could be used to the optimal level. The future prospects of doctors, he added, should also be linked to this effect.

The governor directed that the private practices be regularized and ensure that the quality and environment required for medicare were maintained in private health institutions. The government intention to institutionalize private practice by specialists was aimed at ensuring round-the-clock and efficient utilization of the equipment and infrastructure the government run hospitals had. He assured a legal cover for any step which was pre-requisite for making the affairs of autonomous health bodies smooth.

The governor directed that deserving patients who can not afford to pay for their treatment should be allowed to avail medical facilities free of cost. He said the federal government should be approached for the release of Zakat Fund to make the access of the poor to avail the facilities such as MRI and CT scan etc. He agreed to the proposal for recruitment of staff saying that it should be within the resources of the hospitals and it should not become a liability on the public exchequer and these recruitment must be made under contractual arrangements. The governor said we should not put the shoes on the wrong feet saying that every thing should be carried out in a systematic manner so that the drain of resources were checked and it’s proper utilization ensured.

The governor also approved the plan to ask industrial institutions to bear the treatment of their workers in the autonomous health care institutions. The meeting decided to readjust the user charges. The governor’s directives for taking remedial measures to rectify the situation in the government hospitals also came under discussion and the progress on these directives were tabled at the occasion. Secretaries of health, finance, labour and Zakat, chief executives of LRH, HTH, HMC and AMC, DG health and other related officers of health department attended the meeting.