KASUR: Diagnostic labs have proliferated in the district, aided by public hospital doctors, and many of these labs do not meet required standards.

The Punjab Healthcare Commission (PHC) is mandated to check the lab practices.

Deputy District Health Officer Dr Muhammad Mushtaq Gill said the number of diagnostic labs working in the district was far beyond the number of pathologists available in the region. He also said the local district health structure was working with three pathologists for labs at 15 health facilities -- the district headquarters hospital, three tehsil headquarters hospitals, and 11 rural health centres.

An official, seeking anonymity, said that to fill this gap, many pathologists had given their licences on rent, and labs were being run on their behalf. A lab only hangs a frame ( in the lab) showing the diploma of a pathologist, who is never found at the lab.

A visit to different labs showed that most of the labs were being run by those individuals who were not pathologists. In many cases, the staffers are matriculates and necessary gadgets are missing.

The district administration said they had no data on medical labs.

An employee of a private lab told Dawn that in most of the cases only one parameter of the test was correctly checked while the others were guessed. He also said that public hospitals offered facilities for a few tests, forcing the patients to rush to private labs.

He further said that private labs were conning people through commission agents -- doctors and paramedics.

He also said that mostly people do not trust the tests carried out at public hospitals, and this perception was being cashed in by private labs.

An official said the labs used illegal methods of waste disposal, even at public labs. He said public hospitals only carry out tests called strips or devised methods, whereas people had to depend on private labs for ELISA Method (that detects and measures antibodies in the blood) and PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction Test that detects genetic material from pathogen or abnormal cell samples).

Members of the public, Muhammad Iqbal, Muhammad Salaman, and Khalid Hussain, alleged that some of the chain system labs were giving hefty commissions to doctors who, in return, would refer patients to them. They said that the job of giving commission became easy and confidential after the software was developed to feed the names of doctors along with the prescribed test. The middleman was removed, and the lab owners and doctors were in direct connection.

Other than the violation of quality standards, these labs had different prices for the same investigations.

One such owner of a lab in Kasur said that after working for a year or so in a lab in Lahore, he established his own lab near a public hospital.

“If you have connections with doctors and paramedics in a public health facility, you will never worry about patients,” he said.

DDHO Dr Gill said their teams visit labs and, in case of violation, labs are sealed.

Chief Health Officer Dr Laeeque Ahmed said the checking of diagnostic labs was the prime responsibility of the healthcare commission. He said the health department only checks the license issued by the PHC and infection control at the lab. He further said that checking of equipment or charges of investigation was beyond the scope of the district health department.

Published in Dawn, April 16th, 2023