PESHAWAR, May 20: Withdrawal of local call facility from doctors at the Khyber Teaching Hospital has created a difficult situation for staff and patients, doctors told Dawn on Monday.

According to a doctor, in case of an emergency, nurses now have to go to the telephone booths located at the front gate of the hospital to contact a doctor.

The practice is hitting the patients hard as it takes quite a long time to go outside and contact the doctor from a PCO. The problem becomes even grave when these booths are closed after midnight.

“The administration does not know about medical complications. Sometimes, even a normal looking patient’s condition may suddenly deteriorate for which the on-duty doctor or nurse has no option except to call the senior doctor to handle the situation,” a consultant said.

He alleged that the hospital administration had allowed a dozen telephone booths inside the hospital and received grafts from them on a monthly basis.

Apparently, under the booth owners’ influence, the administration banned local calls from the hospital exchange as this was affecting the booth owners’ business.

“The hospital administration is allowing anyone to install a telephone booth who can pay. Even in front of the emergency ward, three telephone booths have been installed,” said a doctor. He added that the operators at these telephone booths were overcharging the people, yet no action was being taken against them.

“We have banned the local telephone calls from the hospital exchange due to heavy bills we paid every month. The hospital staffers made unnecessary calls from the hospital which inflated the bills,” claimed an official of the hospital.

However, he pointed out, the telephone operator at the hospital exchange had been directed to entertain the “genuine” calls of doctors.

The KTH doctors and staffers, however, argued that they never made unnecessary calls and it was, in fact, the administration staff who made long distance calls and blamed the doctors and nurses for that.

A telephone operator at the KTH told Dawn that they could not entertain calls except those made by the members of the administration.

He admitted that the decision to ban local calls from the hospital had gone down very well with the owners of the private telephone booths.