PESHAWAR, March 4: Hospital staff has been causing financial loss to their respective institutions by not issuing receipts to the patients from whom they receive fee for different tests, sources revealed.

"A relative of a patient lodged complaint against two laboratory technicians for not giving them receipts of Rs 300, which he had paid for HBS and HCV tests of his mother," said an official at one of the city's hospitals.

According to him, the hospital employees have been resorting to such practices after the government abolished their share from the users' charges in October last year. The paramedical as well as clerical staff used to draw share from the users' charges.

"Scrapping of share from users' charges had adversely affected the employees, who got around Rs5,000 a month in this head. To fill up that gap, they are now charging fee from the patients but not giving them receipts and in this way the fee taken from the patients goes into their pockets instead of the hospital fund," the official said.

Some of the laboratory technicians received specimens from the patients' relatives for analysis and give them results without testing the same, a doctor at a teaching hospital told Dawn.

He said that blood of two hospitalised patients was tested positive for Hepatitis C, but the tests of both the patients emerged negative when conducted from private laboratories.

The technicians, he said, receive specimens from the patients, but owing to non-availability of agents required for Hepatitis B & C, they furnished results without testing the blood. "It is a great blunder. On the one hand, they fleece the patients, while on the other give false results, on which the doctor rely to advice treatment to the patients," a doctor said.