HYDERABAD: Pakistan Mu­­slim League-Functional leader Nusrat Sehar Abbasi has said that Pakistan Peoples Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari does not tire of referring to National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases as a success story but in fact people are being hoodwinked in its name.

She said that she challenged the PPP chief to visit any other hospital of his choice and see for himself the pathetic conditions.

Ms Abbasi was talking to journalists after a surprise visit of Sir Cowasjee Institute of Psychiatry here on Monday where she found medical superintendent and a number of other officials absent. The MS, Dr Aijaz Qadir Patoli, reached the hospital immediately after learning about her visit.

Ms Abbasi talked to attendants of patients who expressed their grievances and then talked to additional MS. She was told that MS was on leave to which she observed that if he had proceeded on leave it should have been on the hospital’s record.

She said that pathetic conditions prevailed at the largest psychiatric institute. The visitors to the hospital were not using face masks nor were their hands being sanitized by the hospital administration, she said.

She said that patients were getting treatment for a long period but they were not recovering successfully. Patients from across Sindh were admitted to the psychiatric institute but they were not even being provided quality food, she said.

She said that testing laboratory had been closed and MS’s office was being established at a cost of Rs40m. Sindh government had posted its blue-eyed boys in the hospital, she said.

She said that since she herself was subjected to mental torture in Sindh Assembly she feared she might one day end up in this hospital for treatment, therefore, she found it necessary to keep herself abreast of existing facilities in the hospital.

When MS Dr Patoli rushed back to the hospital, he objected to the MPA’s unscheduled visit but she dismissed it.

The MS later told journalists that he had informed the MPA that it was risky on her part to visit different wards of the hospital along with a large number of people who might be asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus.

He said that laboratory had already been shifted to its proper place with all diagnostic facilities a year back. It was in fact committee room beside the MS’s office which was under construction, he said.

Published in Dawn, July 7th, 2020