PESHAWAR: Medical Teaching Institution Lady Reading Hospital is carrying out fixed asset evaluation for the first time in 100 years to know about the worth of the equipment, machinery, lands and buildings, according to sources.

The exercise, meant to ensure accountability and put brakes on the misappropriation of funds and equipment, would be done by a professional consultancy firm to record and evaluate assets of the hospital besides bar coding.

It will be for the first that any hospital in the province will document its assets comprehensively as at present there is no complete valuation record about the assets, it has.

During the process, everything would be brought on record including the departments using the assets or equipment as well as the relevant persons holding the charge. If equipment or other accessories are shifted from one place to another, it would be recorded. Currently, such a record is missing.

Exercise meant to ensure accountability

The province’s oldest and biggest 1800-bed hospital was the first to implement Medical Teaching Institutions Reforms Act, 2015. So far, nine hospitals have enforced the law but except LRH, others are yet to ensure benefits of their staff. As the MTIs employees are being hired on fixed pay with no pension and other post-retirement benefits like the civil servants, it has also established Contributory Provident Fund under which 7.5 per cent is deducted from the salaries of staffers and a matching amount is put by the hospital for each worker.

The funds are deposited in government-approved schemes in banks on which the employees also get mark-up and they can withdraw the amount as per the policy.

More than 2,000 MTI employees, including doctors, nurses and paramedics are entitled to avail voluntary pension scheme of National Bank of Pakistan, which also offers up to 30 per cent tax rebate besides a monthly mark-up. Under it, an employee also gets health insurance and Rs7 million is paid to his family as compensation in case of death.

The HMIS system developed by Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre (SKMCH&RC) has helped attendance of staff, distribution of salaries, receipts and expenses.

The LRH finance director, Javed Afridi, said that SKMCH & RC was imparting training to the staff and provided LRH with software free of cost due to which the financial matters were streamlined.

“The Board of Governors has been asking us to give benefits to the employees to retain their services for the effective healthcare of the people,” he said.

It is the first time in the history of the province that LRH is carrying out an asset evaluation, which would help the administration to ensure better utilisation as well as safety of the equipment, machinery, furniture and other stuff.

Dr Nausherwan Burki, the chairman of Policy Board, told Dawn that they had asked all MTIs to introduce reforms on the pattern of LRH to provide financial incentives to the staff. “There is an improvement in the performance of MTIs but its pace is very slow. We need to monitor the situation carefully,” he added.

He said that salary structure of the LRH employees was much better now and they were happy. The IT section of the hospital made things easy and the online system enabled the staffers to receive their salaries, along with online pay slip, exactly at the end of every month, he added.

Dr Burki appreciated the finance section of LRH and hoped that other MTIs would follow suit.

Published in Dawn, September 7th, 2021