PESHAWAR: The Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre in Peshawar will start operations by the end of the year.

“The hospital is bigger than SKMCH&RC, Lahore. It will provide more advanced medical facilities to the patients. Like Lahore, 25 per cent patients will pay for the services and 75 per cent will get free treatment but they will get the same facilities,” Dr Faisal Sultan, the chief executive officer of SKMCH&RC, Lahore, told this scribe.

According to him, there will be no VIP room in the hospital and rich and poor will get the same facilities.

“Our people are very generous and acknowledged the services offered by SKMCH&RC since it began operations in Lahore in 1994. We have a system under which the doctors don’t know about the paying and non-paying status of their patients,” he said.

Dr Faisal said they were starting out patients departments (OPDs), emergency, intensive care unit and laboratory for local patients from December this year. The patients would get chemotherapy and radiation facilities in Peshawar and those patients, who required operations, would be referred to Lahore but they would also get their post-operation treatment in Peshawar, he said.

Construction work is in progress to complete the OPDs, chemotherapy facilities and an inpatient unit in the first phase, the estimated cost of which is over Rs4 billion.

“In the second and third phases, we expect to add radiation and surgical services, increase the total number of inpatient beds and add a full intensive care unit,” said Dr Faisal.

He said that they relied on the donations to accomplish the project.

“We have done this in the past by making the first SKMCH&RC Lahore and together we can do this again by transforming the second SKMCH&RC, Peshawar from a dream into reality,” he said.

Dr Faisal said that within three years, it would become a full-fledged state-of-the-art cancer hospital, which would be capable of receiving all types of patients.“Our annual budget for Lahore hospital is Rs7 billion, 46 per cent of which is generated from own resources and the rest comes from donations,” he said.

Like Lahore, Peshawar hospital will be run through Board of Governors, with Imran Khan as its chairman.

Dr Faisal said that the money collected from Zakat was spent only on patients’ treatment while cost of construction, purchase of equipment and machines etc came from donations given by people at fund-raising events being held in Pakistan and abroad.

The need for more cancer facilities was desperately felt now in view of the rapid increase in number of patients, he said. An estimated 40,000 patients, who currently visited Lahore for treatment from Pakhtunkhwa and Federally Administered Tribal Areas, would be the main beneficiaries of Peshawar hospital, he said.

“It will be a full-scale cancer centre, with diagnostic, treatment and research facilities. It will be imparting training to doctors, paramedics and nurses, who would be working in public sector hospitals across the province,” he said.

The Peshawar hospital will also receive patients from Afghanistan as well as some people from Lahore because of the availability of most-advanced facilities here.

Dr Faisal said that cancers of breast and esophagus were more prevalent among the patients but those were curable provided they were diagnosed promptly. Forty to 50 per cent patients happened to be in adult age group, he said.

Awareness about early detection of cancer, prevention and research would go side by side in line with the mission of SKMCH&RC, he said. Dr Faisal said that on average, treatment cost for one patient was between Rs800,000 to Rs1million.

The previous provincial government of ANP has donated 50 kanals of land in Hayatabad locality for the construction of SKMCH&RC, Peshawar.

Published in Dawn, September 28th , 2015

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