RAWALPINDI, March 19: Quackery is being practised at the medical centre set up at the Pakistan Red Crescent Society’s (PRCS) Rawalpindi office, where a blood bank technician, Allah Bux, attends to patients.

PRCS secretary Dr Nusrat Ara, while accepting the charge, said she had asked Mr Bux to refrain from doing so. However, on being contacted on Tuesday afternoon in this connection, PRCS head clerk Sajid and another employee, Bostan, confirmed that “Dr Allah Bux” was attending to the patients.

It has also been learnt that there is no doctor in any one of almost a dozen dispensaries being run by the PRCS. Dispensers attend to the patients at these dispensaries. The society spends over a million rupees on purchasing medicines, all of which are distributed through dispensers, without a doctor’s advice.

The PRCS blood bank, one of the finest in the town, established for providing blood to poor patients and extending help during emergencies, has been lying closed for quite some time. However, the blood bank staff, specially trained by the PRCS, continues to get paid.

Some local hospitals, which contacted the PRCS office for blood in the wake of Shah-i-Najaf terrorist attack, were told by the staff that not even a single bag of blood was available at the bank.

The hospitals had also requested to be arranged the PRCS ambulance to carry the victims. However, the ambulance could not be used, the driver being away to a party with an official. On inspecting the log book, it transpired that the ambulance had not been used in any emergency in recent past.

The PRCS secretary, while replying to this, said the hospitals should have contacted the PRCS station in Islamabad for blood and ambulance.

However, according to the PRCS constitution, the local chapter is bound to extend all possible help for the wounded.

The PRCS is supposed to arrange medical camps, but none has been arranged in the past few years. The Rawalpindi chapter has not even held any motivational campaign in the wake of tensions on borders.

Members of the society charged that the PRCS Rawalpindi chapter was a shambles due to maladministration on the part of the previous management. Although the management has been replaced, the much needed improvement is still nowhere in sight.

Secretary PRCS Rawalpindi, Dr Nusrat Ara, who was appointed a couple of months ago, claimed that she was still busy cleaning up the mess created by her predecessors.

Dr Ara’s appointment by the district administration has also generated a lot of controversy. Certain members of the PRCS executive have raised objections on her appointment “in a total disregard of the PRCS constitution” which, they claimed, required of a secretary to have worked as a member of the society. Dr Ara, they said, had never been a PRCS member before her appointment as the secretary and therefore could not understand its working mechanism.

Talking to this scribe, Dr Ara confirmed that she had never been associated with the PRCS before her appointment as the secretary but contended that she had accepted the office for the sake of the suffering humanity.

The secretary has been appointed by the district coordination officer, who, under the constitution, is allowed to make only ad hoc arrangements. A secretary can only be elected by the society’s district branch committee which is its executive organ.

Executive committee members have demanded an inquiry into the sorry state of affairs at the PRCS as well as appointment of Dr Ara as secretary.