PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court on Wednesday directed the public sector Khyber Teaching Hospital to restore power supply to a prosthetics workshop and ordered the immediate resumption of work at the facility.

Also, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) was asked by Chief Justice Qaiser Rashid Khan and Justice Syed Arshad Ali to look into the allegations of the hospital’s management regarding the misuse of the workshop by some technicians and irregularities in its affairs.

The bench was hearing two contempt petitions filed by patients Javed Islam and Izharullah, who challenged the disconnection of power supply to the workshop by the hospital’s management in Jan this year.

Additional advocate general Mohammad Sohail, deputy director (administration) at the social welfare directorate Abdul Qayyum Khan, head of the Artificial Limbs Workshop Tahira Ali, KTH hospital director Roohul Muqeem and other officials appeared before the bench.

The petition were represented by advocates Ziaul Hassan and Ali Gohar Durrani.

Abdul Qayyum and Tahira Ali told the bench that the workshop was set up in 1981 with the financial support of the German government to provide artificial limbs to patients free of charge.

Directs FIA to probe alleged anomalies in facility’s affairs

They added that even hundreds of people, who had suffered injuries during terrorist attacks, had benefitted from the workshop.

The lawyers as in the past, the social welfare and health departments were one entity and therefore, the workshop was set up on the premises of the hospital so that the patients from the hospital could easily visit it.

They said in 2017, the hospital management had shifted the workshop to a premises attached to it, which, in the past, was utilised as a government inn (serai khana).

The lawyers added that the said premises was declared a property of the social welfare department by the government in the Annual Development Programme in 2005.

They said the hospital’s management recently suspended power supply to the premises rendering the workshop non-functional to the misery of patients.

Hospital director Roohul Muqeem said the KTH’s management wanted to set up a modern prosthetics workshop on the premises.

The director alleged that most visitors to the workshop were relatives of the technicians, who were using the facility to make money.

He alleged that certain illegal activities were carried out in the workshop.

Abdul Qayyum rejected the claims and insisted that the workshop had been providing prosthetic limbs to visitors free of charge and the records would prove it.

He said the court could probe the claims.

The two petitioners had moved the court in 2017 the shifting of the workshop’s machinery from its previous premises to the current building that stands adjacent to the hospital, claiming that the hospital’s management intended to close down the facility.

However, the management insisted that the workshop was shifted due to the renovation of the current premises. Those petitions were disposed of after the management declared that it didn’t intend to close down the workshop.

Published in Dawn, May 27th, 2021