PESHAWAR: The Public Health Reference Laboratory (PHRL) has sought permission of health department to stop operations and relieve its staff for wants of funds, according to sources.

In a letter addressed to the director general health services, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the PHRL director has sought approval to stop working because of financial issues. The PHRL is located at Khyber Medical University (KMU) but run by health department. It has been demanding funds to keep its operations afloat.

On Monday, PHRL director Yasar Mahmood Yousafzai said in the letter that the laboratory had run out of funds to pay salaries to its 73 daily-wager employees including technical, administrative and support personnel, who required Rs2. 84 million on monthly basis.

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed in 2017 signed among health department, KMU and National Institute of Health (NIH), Islamabad, states that the former will release annual grant to meet the operational cost of the laboratory on regular basis.

Director seeks approval to relieve staff and stop operations due to lack of funds

However, in spite of frequent reminders, funds have not been released for payment of salaries to staff, purchase of kits and reagents and other activities.

The director said that testing had to be stopped and staffers would be sent home owing to non-availability of funds.

Subsequently testing of Covid-19 and other communicable diseases would be affected as the laboratory could not continue operations any longer, he added.

He has mentioned in the letter that equipment worth Rs211 million will go into disuse as trained staff will be relieved of duty. He has sought approval of health department to terminate the services of the employees and shut down PHRL.

Sources in health department said that they had received a similar letter last month wherein a demand for Rs40 million had been made to continue processing samples of Covid-19, mpox, typhoid, cholera, dengue, Congo fever, chikungunya, hepatitis and influenza cases.

The PHRL had so far conducted 1.8 million Covid-19 PCR tests besides helping health department to establish 11 more laboratories at the district level when Covid-19 was at its peak. Prior to establishment of PHRL, these specimens were sent to NIH that took longer time to issue results.

Health department had established PHRL as per the guidelines of International Health Regulations of World Health Organisation under which all the provinces were required to have investigation services for diseases of international concerns.

Sources said that KMU was only hosting the laboratory on its premises and paid more than Rs1 million in lieu of electricity bills from its own resources. They said that the province required those services because the international organisations, such as WHO and Centre for Disease Control needed data about ailments.

They said that last year, UK imposed travel ban on local residents as it wanted genome sequencing of Covid-19 positive cases to know about the prevalence of new variants. As a result, PHRL started sequencing and the ban was lifted. “We have already asked the hospitals to send samples of suspected patients of Congo fever due to arrival of Eidul Fitr during which the people come into contact with animals,” they added.

Sources said that last time, the government released funds in 2021 that had already exhausted and the operations of the laboratory couldn’t be continued any more despite the fact that health department needed it to take preventive measures against outbreaks of diseases.

“Last year, we were able to put brakes on outbreak of cholera during flood because of timely investigation at PHRL,” they said.

Director General Health Services Dr Shaukat Ali, when contacted, said that they had approached different donors to get financial assistance for PHRL but couldn’t obtained it.

“Finance department will be approached through health secretary for arrangement of the needed funds. We are trying our level best to provide best healthcare services to people and the role of PHRL is significant in investigating diseases for subsequent response,” he said.

Published in Dawn, June 13th, 2023