PESHAWAR, Dec 16: The NWFP government has decided to accommodate the outgoing students of private medical colleges for house job in the teaching hospitals of the city.

During the training, the doctors would be given Rs5,000 as monthly stipend, said a handout on Tuesday.

The decision was taken during a meeting of a committee presided over by senior minister Sirajul Haq and attended by Health Services Director-General Dr Jalilur Rehman, MPA Syed Mazhar Ali Shah, Hayatabad Medical Complex Chief Executive Dr Shad Mohammad Khan and Khyber Medical College Principal Dr Ziaul Islam.

The senior minister, while announcing the decision, made it clear that  there should be supremacy of merit and said a realistic approach should be adopted because of the backwardness and illiteracy in the province.

He said the province needed more doctors.

#WORKSHOP:# Speakers at a workshop urged the ophthalmologists to  sensitize the community on eye ailments check the rising number of blind people.

The three-day workshop entitled “Vision 2020” has been organized by the Pakistan Institute of Community Ophthalmology, the World Health Organization, the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom.

The speakers said the workshop was aimed at sensitizing the senior ophthalmologists and policy makers regarding the Vision 2020 plan and its impact on the National Eye Care Programme.

They said the Vision 2020 — the right to sight project was launched by the WHO in 1999 eliminate avoidable blindness by 2020.