RAWALPINDI, Aug 28: The city hospitals’ administrations have been instructed to ensure presence of senior doctors and availability of medicines in the casualty wards of their hospitals, official sources told Dawn here on Wednesday.

These instructions have been issued by the board of governors of the hospitals to ensure round-the-clock presence of registrars and medical officers (MOs) in the emergency and casualty wards.

At present, the patients at the casualty ward are being treated by postgraduate trainees and house officers. The new order has surprised senior doctors.

There have been reports of mishandling of emergency cases by junior doctors and the board’s decision may rectify the situation, a doctor said.

Some of the senior registrars and medical officers when contacted for their reaction, termed the orders “unrealistic”.

The BoG, they said, was practically doing nothing to implement the health reforms, which they said, clearly called for a ban on procedural private practice, but neither the ban was being observed nor attention was being paid to other malpractices.

They said the health reforms had failed to achieve what was expected of them. Instead, they had added to the burden in the shape of hefty salaries being given to the principal executive officers and others being appointed under the new rules.

The BoG has also directed the administrations to ensure availability of all medicines to the patients in the emergency ward and perform diagnostic tests within the hospital.

The board also took serious note of the malfunctioning of life saving equipment at the emergency wards.

The situation, the sources said, was particularly bad in Rawalpindi General Hospital where hardly any medicine was provided to patients in the emergency ward. Most of the electro- medical equipment is non-functional.

A head of the department, when contacted, said the procedure for getting the equipment repaired was cumbersome and the principal executive officer seldom responded to public complaints.

It has also been learnt that the repair bills are usually fabricated, and even if the electric fuse goes off, hefty bills are made in connivance with the accounts department.

A source confided that he could show bills charged for repairing equipment that had not been used in the last 10 years.