MUZAFFARABAD, Sept 11: The two public sector medical colleges in Azad Kashmir (AJK) are expending cash-strapped region’s resources extravagantly but the health minister says he can’t do anything as he has no role in the management of these nascent institutions.
Not only huge amount is being dished out to the expensive faculty hired from the “open market”, classified specialists on the roll of AJK health department also feel depressed at alleged absence of any tangible plans for development of local human resource as well as alleged impediments to their promotion over the next two years.
The PC-1s of AJK Medical College (AJKMC) Muzaffarabad and Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Medical College (SBBMC) Mirpur, amounting to Rs2.7 billion and Rs3.176 billion, respectively, were recently approved by Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec) for 24 months (beginning July 2012).
However, neither the AJK health department nor the approving forums had questioned or slashed inflated allocations for different heads, most of which had no precedence in any other public sector medical college across the country.
For example, sources said, the faculty drawn from the “open market” was being offered unwarranted pay packages.
Principals were getting Rs500,000 each, a professor Rs425,000, associate professor Rs350,000, assistant professor Rs200,00 and senior lecturer Rs100,000, with a 5 per cent increase from next fiscal year.
Among the 439-member faculties of colleges were 42 and 23 health department specialists, attached as assistant professors and senior lecturers, respectively, who were being given monthly allowance of Rs30,000 and Rs20,000, respectively.
“This is a sort of a lollipop to keep our mouths shut over exorbitantly high pay packages of contractual faculty,” one beneficiary remarked.
He confided to Dawn that at the end of last year he had received a cheque of around Rs245,000 from the AJKMC although he had not delivered a single lecture to this day.
One of the professed objectives of establishment of medical colleges and hiring of highly paid faculty was “improvement of healthcare service delivery in AJK.”
However, sources in Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan (SKZN) Hospital disclosed that hardly any professor had been regularly attending indoor and outdoor patients, emergency calls and operation theatres there.
Abbas Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS) executive director Dr Abdul Quddus Akhtar said some faculty members were attending his institution “thrice a week,” but added that “unless modalities of working relationship between teaching hospitals and the medical college were determined and departments are established these objectives cannot be achieved.”
Sources said the appointment orders of clinical sciences faculty members were flawed, providing them loopholes to run their private clinics in Islamabad, instead of providing full-time services at the place of the appointments.
Situation in SBBMC was worst because as the college did not have any attached hospital the clinical faculty members were not found in the town, except for lecture days.
Sources also alleged that many appointments in both colleges were made either superfluously or in gross oversight of official policies to accommodate one or the other favourite.
Interestingly, at least four faculty members were those former employees of the AJK health department who were sacked or forcibly retired by the AJK government owing to misconduct.
However, the most worrying issue was alleged absence of a clear mechanism to develop local human resource to gradually replace the expensive faculty and thus considerably reduce the administrative costs of the colleges.
Local specialists were also exasperated at what they believed virtual elimination of opportunities for their promotion beyond BPS-18.
Sources said the government could get at least five of its own specialists recognised (from the PMDC) as associate professors as a special case as a first step to prepare indigenous faculty but no heed was being paid to it.
Justifying the faculty, Dr Hameed Durrani, a spokesman for the AJKMC, told Dawn that the AJKMC was the only public sector medical college where “integrated problem based learning system” had been introduced because “no other education system would be acceptable beyond 2016.”Responding to a question, he claimed that Finance Minister Dr Hafeez Shaikh had stated at the Ecnec meeting that he was approving these huge cost projects because of (AJKMC principal) Dr Muhammad Iqbal. Other participants of meeting however did not verify his claim.When contacted by Dawn, AJK minister for health Sardar Qamaruz Zaman said he had nothing to do with the medical colleges as the government had assigned the task of their establishment and management to an executive committee, headed by the chief secretary.
“It’s why many problems have cropped up which will cause further problems in the days to come. And I have been warning about it from the day one,” he said.
