Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif taking notice of non-functional Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) facility at PIMS highlights a problem that hardly needs discovering poor state of affairs in country’s public hospitals. The condition of these hospitals is well known to government and the public. What is disturbing is that a routine administrative matter at a major public hospital has invited PM’s intervention, when such issues should ordinarily be identified and resolved by hospital administration itself.
The real issue is not simply the non-availability of a machine. Equipment shortages, though serious, are unfortunately common in public hospitals. The more troubling question is why an essential machine was allowed to remain non-functional for years, and why a functional CTA machine reportedly available in the radiology department was not used because of a lack of coordination between departments. This raises a fundamental question: what are those entrusted with running these hospitals doing? Hospital administrations have a responsibility to ensure that essential equipment remains functional, departments coordinate with one another and patients receive the services they are entitled to. If these basic responsibilities are not being fulfilled, merely constituting an inquiry committee will not address the larger problem. The committee should certainly establish what went wrong at PIMS and fix responsibility yet the matter must not end there. There should be a comprehensive review of all public hospitals which should examine the condition and functionality of medical equipment, maintenance arrangements, staffing, departmental coordination, referral practices and quality of service to patients. The people who depend on public hospitals are overwhelmingly those who cannot afford costly private healthcare. They have a right to functioning facilities, competent care and above all, to be treated with dignity and respect. There is a need of political will, administrative accountability and a serious programme to transform public hospitals into institutions that actually serve the public.
