ISLAMABAD: After years of effort, the management of Polyclinic hospital finally has a computed tomography (CT) scan machine. The machine has been placed in the radiology department of the hospital.

Minister of National Health Services Abdul Qadir Patel, in a statement, said that installation of the machine was in his list of priorities.

It is worth mentioning that parliamentary committees on health of both houses of parliament had also, a number of times, issued directions to relevant officials to get the machine for the hospital at the earliest.

The minister said that, with the support of the Japanese government, a 1.5 Tesla Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine will also be installed in the hospital soon.

He said that a state-of-the-art 3D mammography machine has been installed in the hospital.

“Diagnosis of cancer will be improved because of the mammography machine. Earlier, there was no facility to diagnose breast cancer in the hospital,” he said, adding that work on extension of the hospital has been started in sector G-11/3. The project will be completed within three years.

“We want to improve the efficiency of government hospitals and I have directed officials to ensure that every patient would get the best possible medical treatment. Currently, there is a huge rush at Polyclinic and Pakistan Institute of medical Sciences (Pims).

“Over 4 million patients get free-of-cost services at Polyclinic every year,” he added.

Mr Patel said reforms in the health sector would be ensured because otherwise societies will not be able to progress, adding that it was the right of patients to get treatment according to their satisfaction.

It is pertinent to mention that Polyclinic was established as a pioneer services hospital in 1966 as Central Government Hospital and it had only eight beds for emergency, surgery, medicine and gynae.

Objective of the hospital is to provide free-of-cost, high quality health care services to government employees. At the moment there are over 600 beds dedicated to primary, secondary and tertiary curative care services to the federal government employees.

Published in Dawn, February 9th, 2023