PESHAWAR: The health department has planned to engage district administrations to evict illegal occupants from the houses built in civil and district hospitals for doctors and other staff members.

In a formal communication, health secretary Mohammad Tahir Orakzai asked all district health officers in the province to compile the lists of illegally occupied official residences of the respective hospitals along with the names of occupants and share them with the director (administration) at the director-general health services offices by Jan 31.

He said most doctors and other staff members transferred to the periphery hospitals often complained about the unavailability of accommodation, which adversely affected patient care.

Health dept says district admins to be engaged for action

The secretary asked medical superintendents of the hospitals to list facilities and illegal occupants of official residences, and share the details with the respective DHOs.

At the same time, the DHOs were told to send those lists to the DGHS director (administration) and relevant deputy commissioners with a request for crackdown on unlawful occupants of houses.

The secretary requested DCs to convene meetings to chalk out strategies to get those places vacated with the help of the police.

He formally asked the director (administration) to coordinate the exercise and produce a report by Jan 31 to prevent punitive action.

Officials of the health department told Dawn that many houses built by the government on the premises of civil and district hospitals for staff members, including doctors, had long been used by officials of other departments and thus, badly affecting patient care.

They said a similar notification was issued last year but the politically well-connected illegal occupants of those houses stayed put.

The officials said the health department needed to get around 90 bungalows and 40 flats of the public sector hospitals vacated in many districts for their allotment to doctors, nurses and paramedics to ensure uninterrupted provision of care to visitors.

They said that posting to hospitals without official accommodation didn’t interest doctors and others.

“As we [department] cannot provide accommodation to the doctors and other employees of civil and district hospitals, patients suffer, especially during night hours,” an official told Dawn.

He said that residences in hospitals were occupied by officials of the police, anti-corruption establishment, education, communication and works, livestock and population welfare departments, Bacha Khan University, district administrations, district health offices and district judiciary, tehsil municipal administrations, Wapda, former employees of the health department, lady health visitors, and district account offices.

The official said that only Chitral had 18 such houses.

He said that the issue had been prevailing in all districts for over a decade denying the deserving hospital employees their right to official accommodation.

The official said that the health department paid electricity and gas bills of the illegal occupied hospital residences besides bearing the costs of their maintenance and repairs.

The health officials said the women employees suffered the most from the issue as they struggled to find suitable and safe places away from the workplaces.

They said patient care would significantly improve in the province if the department managed to evict illegal occupants from officials residences of civil and district hospitals and hand them over to the deserving health employees.

The officials claimed that the initiative would improve the care of critically-injured and ill people, who were currently referred to other facilities even for manageable problems.

Published in Dawn, January 2nd, 2022