Advisor to Chief Minister on Health Khawaja Salman Rafique on Friday announced that organ transplant institutions would be set up in the Punjab soon. He said the government would provide funds to the Children’s Hospital and Shaikh Zayed Hospital for this purpose.
Rafique was addressing the inaugural ceremony of a two-day symposium organised by the Institute of Child Health at Children’s Hospital on Friday. King Edward Medical University Vice Chancellor Faisal Masood, UHS Vice Chancellor Major Gen (r) Muhammad Aslam, Children’s Hospital Dean Masood Sadiq, Medical Director Ahsan Waheed Rathore, faculty members of the institute and several child specialists from India, UAE and Saudi Arabia attended the ceremony.
Rafique said the eradication of polio was a national as well as international responsibility and the Punjab government was determined to make the province polio-free in 2014. He said the government had taken steps to ensure that all children aged five years old and younger, were administered polio drops.
He said the inspector general of police had been requested to provide security to vaccination teams deputed at 42 entry points into Punjab. He said the complete eradication of polio virus was only possible if the virus was also eliminated in the no go areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA. He said hundreds of thousands of children in these areas were deprived of polio vaccination each year.
While responding to a question, Rafique said instead of worrying about NATO supply routes, Imran Khan should approach influential people of FATA and other no-go areas to provide polio vaccination teams with access to far flung areas and security.
The government was upgrading the paediatrics departments of teaching hospitals and DHQs as well as setting up children’s hospitals at the district level, said Rafique. This would decrease the burden on the Lahore Children’s Hospital. He said that problems faced by the Children’s Hospital would be resolved on priority and a new in-patients block would be completed in the current fiscal year.
Children’s Hospital Dean Masood Sadiq said that the Institute of Child Health was providing teaching and research facilities in 43 sub-specialties of paediatrics. He said 200 specialists had completed their FCPS from the institution so far. The Children’s Hospital provided healthcare services and free treatment to children from all over the country and Azad Kashmir. He said the hospital’s bed occupancy was 200 per cent and doctors and nurses often worked beyond their office hours. He also discussed the hospital’s problems with Rafique and requested support to solve them.
There are currently no organ transplant institutions in the province and liver transplantation is carried out only at Shaikh Zaid Hospital.
A senior surgeon at Shaikh Zaid Hospital said that the Health Department had announced that it would establish an organ transplant institute a while back but is yet to execute the project. “Establishing such institutes is an arduous task that requires serious commitment by the government,” he said. “The only hospital that carries out liver transplantation is faced with financial problems and cannot operate on patients up to its capacity due to a shortage of funds,” he said.
The government needs to develop a comprehensive plan for the organ transplantation institutes. “We do not have enough trained transplant surgeons to run independent organ transplant institutes,” he said. “It will take years to build a transplant institute and if the government manages to build a single liver transplant institute during its tenure, we will consider it a huge achievement,” he said.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 28th, 2013.