KARACHI: Private hospitals in the city have turned down the provincial government’s request to dedicate 20 per cent patient space for coronavirus cases.
CM Sindh Murad Ali Shah attended a meeting with the Private Hospitals and Clinics Association where he was proposed to reserve some public tertiary-care hospitals completely as isolation and treatment centres for such patients.
The association members and some other private medical institutions suggested that the provincial government should prepare critical care units at its field isolation centre at the Expo Center Karachi, for which they were ready to provide ventilators as well as doctors and paramedics to the health department.
However, the unavailability of authentic testing kits for diagnosing coronavirus, an acute shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE), an inadequate number of ventilators and the absence of experimental drugs is the persisting issue.
The meeting was held to seek cooperation from private stakeholders in health sector in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic and to discuss as to how the hospitals and health facilities could share the burden of the government in dealing with the confirmed cases of coronavirus.
Dr Abdul Bari, CEO Indus Hospital, Rehan Baloch, EOC Coordinator, Dr Asim Hussain of Ziauddin Hospital, Dr Syed Junaid Shah of A.O. Clinic, Dr Saadia Virk of South City Hospital, Dr Umer Jang of the NMC, Dr Bilal Faiz, CEO Creek General Hospital, Dr Farhan Essa Abdullah, CEO Essa Laboratory, Dr Tahir Yousuf of Tahir Medical Center, Manhaj Qudwai, CEO Health Care Commission, Jawad Amin Khan, commissioner of the SHCC, Dr Ali Imam of Imam Clinic, Ali Farhan of Darul Sehat, Dr Salman Fareedi of the LNH, Zerkais Ankleseria of Ankle Saria Hospital, Brig Dr Waqar of Memon Medical Institute, Dr Mazhar Nizam of Patel Hospital, Commodore Kamran Khan, AKU, Dr Sadiq Ansari and others were present in the meeting.
Private hospital owners came up with excuses despite the government’s offer that it would bear the burden of coronavirus patients, who would be referred to the private hospitals for treatment, private hospital owners refused to allocate 20 per cent beds (10 per cent for isolation and 10 per cent for treatment).
They instead suggested that the government should reserve some public hospitals with hundreds of beds for patients and equip them with machinery and human resources.
The owners also said that Indus Hospital Karachi and Aga Khan University Hospital were cooperating with the government, “due to huge sums of money and grants that are being provided to them”.
The main reason of private hospital owners appeared to be the risk of endangering the lives of their staff but would also ward off their normal patients. They instead claimed that they had lost millions of rupees in revenue since the coronavirus outbreak, as patients were not visiting health facilities, while OPDs were already closed. They feared that if they started keeping and treating coronavirus patients, other patients would not visit the health facilities and this would create another serious health crisis in the country.
It was also disclosed during the meeting the federal government had promised to provide two hundred thousand testing kits to the Sindh government, but in the end, only 18,000 kits were provided to the government and when these kits were given to the labs, they rejected them by declaring them as “substandard kits”, and demanded of the provincial government to purchase good quality testing kits from reputable companies of the world.
